Educational Psychology has three branches to it - Cognitive, Social, and Behavioral.
Cognitive development refers to how a person perceives, thinks, and gains understanding of their world through the interaction of genetic and learned factors. Among the areas of cognitive development are information processing, intelligence, reasoning, language development, and memory.
No doubt, you’ve been introduced to lots of the theorists throughout your undergraduate years, folks like Piaget and Erickson.
I’m sure you know these two theorists.
Since you have heard about these before, my goal is to dig deeper into Educational Psychology by giving you some nuance about a particular aspect of this field that I have some expertise in and keep it fresh this way. This nuance has a lot to do with expanding the old canon of dead white guys and nuancing you with scholars of color who are doing critical work today as well; this is an example of decolonizing the theoretical canon.
NUANCE
I suppose I can say that my simple goal for you in each session is that you move from a little less naive to a little more nuanced each session of class. You are going to be bombarded with tons of new information through Phase 1 of your credential/masters program and it can be overwhelming to “get” and “own” everything, so what I want from you is for you to be consciously picking up 1 to 3 new pieces of content each class session. Nuance just means that you’re adding a little more shade of meaning to your professional repertoire. That’s doable. I mean, really, our lifetime personal and professional goal is to be a little bit more nuanced each day of our lives, right?
I’m pleased to introduce some of you to the relatively new field of cognitive development called brain-based learning (or brain-compatible learning). I’ve mentored and trained under one of the global leaders in this field, Eric Jensen, whom you’ll be hearing from in the short video provided. I certified as a brain-based learning expert with Jensen several years ago and have done international seminars on this topic for years. I hope you’ll find some new and interesting information to help you fine tune your professional skills.
Everything you need is in the burgandy field to the right. There are things I want you to read/view, reflect upon, things I want you to do for the session’s responsibilities, and things there for you to dig deeper should the topic capture your imagination. It’s a play-by-play of this particular session’s tasks.
Let’s get started!