Presenters: Sandra Bond Chapman, Kurt Fischer, Dr. Robert Bjork, Dr. Rita Smilkstein
Run Time: 36 minutes
This course is worth 2 hours (0.2 CEU) of professional development. A certificate of completion can be printed once the program has been completed.
About this Course
Recent brain health breakthroughs provide insight on the most effective ways to build knowledge and improve memory. By understanding brain function, we can more accurately develop techniques that make us effective educators by ensuring students are able to recall what we teach. Classroom and study methods will be explored.
You Will Learn:
Sandra Bond Chapman, Ph.D., founder and chief director of the Center for BrainHealth, is the Dee Wyly Distinguished Professor in BrainHealth, and a Professor in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at The University of Texas at Dallas. Dr. Chapman is a cognitive neuroscientist and was one of 20 core scientists nationwide invited to participate in a National Science Foundation Think Tank Workshop to solve Higher Order Cognitive Decline in Teens in the United States. With more than 120 publications and 40 funded research grants, Dr. Chapman is dedicated to translating her leading-edge research to serve as a national public health road map both in the discovery of ways to maintain cognitive health into late life and build critical thinking and reasoning skills in today’s youth. Her research record and brain health breakthroughs have led to nationwide recognition and selection of the Center for BrainHealth as the single Virtual Center for the National Pediatric Acquired Brain Injury Plan to link all states with the most current assessment and training for brain injury. She is a core member of the National Institutes of Health for selecting the central data elements for nationwide clinical trials in acquired brain injury and has garnered major federal, state, and private research support to advance treatment for America's veterans, sports concussions, healthy brain aging, adolescent reasoning and brain development, Alzheimer's disease and related dementias, autism, schizophrenia, ADHD, social cognition disorders, and many others.
Kurt Fischer, Professor and Director of Mind, Brain and Education, Harvard University, leads an international movement to connect biology and cognitive science to education, and is founding editor of the journal Mind, Brain, and Education (Blackwell), which received the award for Best New Journal by the Association of American Publishers. As Director of the Mind, Brain, and Education Program and Charles Bigelow Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, he does research on cognition, emotion, and learning and their relation to biological development and educational assessment. In his research, he has discovered a general scale that provides tools for assessing learning and development in any domain. His most recent books include The Educated Brain and Mind, Brain, and Education in Reading Disorders (Cambridge University Press, 2008 and 2007).
Fischer studies cognitive and emotional development and learning from birth through adulthood, combining analysis of the commonalities across people with the diversity of pathways of learning and development. His work focuses on the organization of behavior and the ways it changes, especially with development, learning, emotion, and culture. In dynamic skill theory, he provides a single framework to analyze how organismic and environmental factors contribute to the rich variety of developmental change and learning across and with people. His research includes students’ learning and problem solving, brain development, concepts of self in relationships, cultural contributions to social-cognitive development, early reading skills, emotions, child abuse, and brain development. One product of his research is a single scale for measuring learning, teaching, and curriculum across domains, which is being used to assess and coordinate key aspects of pedagogy and assessment in schools. Fischer has been visiting professor or visiting scholar at University of Geneva (Switzerland), University of Pennsylvania, University of Groningen (Netherlands), Nanjing Normal University (China), and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford). He is the author of “Dynamic Development of Action, Thought, and Emotion” in the Handbook of Child Psychology (Volume 1), Human Behavior and the Developing Brain, Mind, Brain, and Education in Reading Disorders, and a dozen other books, as well as over 200 scientific articles. Leading an international movement to connect biology and cognitive science to education, he is founding president of the International Mind, Brain, and Education Society and founding editor of the new journal Mind, Brain, and Education.
Robert A. Bjork is Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Director of the Bjork Learning &Forgetting Lab at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on human learning and memory and on the implications of the science of learning for instruction and training. He has served as Editor of Memory & Cognition (1981-85) and PsychologicalReview (1995-2000), Co-editor of Psychological Science in the Public Interest (1998-2004), and Chair of a National Research Council Committee on Techniques for the Enhancement of Human Performance (1988-1994). He is a past president or chair of the American Psychological Society (APS); the Western Psychological Association; the Psychonomic Society; the Society of Experimental Psychologists; the Council of Editors of the American Psychological Association (APA); and the Council of Graduate Departments of Psychology. He is a recipient of UCLA's Distinguished Teaching Award; the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientist Lecturer and Distinguished Service to Psychological Science Awards; and the American Physiological Society's Claude Bernard Distinguished Lectureship Award.
Dr. Rita Smilkstein, a frequent speaker nationally and internationally on brain-compatible teaching, is currently Professor Emerita at North Seattle Community College, and Invited Faculty at Western Washington University’s Woodring College of Education. Her publications include textbooks and articles on brain-compatible curricula and pedagogy. Her book We’re Born to Learn: Using the Brain’s Natural Learning Process to Create Curriculum (Corwin Press, 2003) was awarded the Delta Kappa Gamma Society International's Educator's Book of the Year Award for 2004. This award recognizes books that "may influence the direction of thought and action necessary to meet the needs of today's complex society." Her latest book, which she co-authored, is Igniting Student Potential: Teaching with the Brain’s Natural Learning Process (2007). Among her many teaching awards are two Excellence Awards from the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development. In 2005, she was honored with the College Reading and Learning Association’s most prestigious award, the Robert Griffin Award for Long and Outstanding Service. In 2006, she was elected as a Fellow of the American Council of Developmental Education Associations, the highest honor in the field of developmental education, learning assistance, and tutoring services.
