The human brain, whether an adult, a teen, or a child, has a limit with regard to an attention span. As a result, the new information that I came across was that teaching is best done when interspersed with other physical activities. This means that during the learning activity, we do not have a situation where the learner is engaged in observation throughout. Brandt (1995) observes that this approach to learning helps the students to retain much more information.

The surprising thing I learnt is that either reward or punishment has no clear advantage to learning. This is because the learner may end up losing intrinsic motivation to learn, and in the process reduce effort. It therefore demands that the teacher puts much more effort in configuring the content to be taught so that it becomes stimulating to the learner Brandt (1995. The advantage of this is that it gives the learner a choice to voluntarily participate in the learning process.

Looking at Jensen and Gladwell, the amount of content taught, should be limited to only what can reasonably be synthesized by the brain, so that learning can take place. Too much information taught may create a situation whereby the learner is distracted, bored and uninterested.

If I were to teach, I will ensure that the content is broken down into parts that can be linked to what the learner already knows and which he can connect (Sandy, n.d.). In between the content, there should be physical activities that will help learners to synthesize what they have observed or heard.

An ideal learning environment should be one where content being taught is made stimulating to the learner. Besides, Sandy (n.d.) observes that the teacher should also be ready to learn from the students.

References

Brandt, R. (1995). “Punished by Rewards? A Conversation with Alfie Kohn”. Education

Leadership, 53(1),

Sandy, L. R. (n.d.). The Effective Teacher. Retrieved November 4, 2013 from

http://oz.plymouth.edu/~lsandy/effective.html

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