Brain And Learning



A SKETCH OF WALDORF EDUCATION STRATEGIES, LEARNING SEQUENCE,

BRAIN PROCESSING AND MEMORY STORAGE

Waldorf education strategies are comparable to brain-based learning approaches. Brain-based learning indicates that a rhythmic and meaning-filled daily routine helps students maintain interest and concentration. Waldorf education enriches the daily learning experience with rhythm and ritual. The Waldorf education sequence includes kinesthetic activities, oral language presentations, lesson imaging, and artistic activities. Lesson imaging is the design of image and story sequences that directs problem solving and aids content retention for students. This sequence provides for the unfolding of initiative, learning interest, and intentional learning skills.

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Kinesthetic Activities

The Waldorf learning sequence usually begins with kinesthetic activities. These activities use rhythm, body geography, gesture and games to kinesthetically render lesson concepts. Kinesthetic activities also remediate underdeveloped sensory-motor coordination and establish non-verbal cues for classroom discipline. The processing of these activities involve the motor cortex and working memory. The motor cortex processes voluntary movement, and the working memory represents objects and processes necessary for the moment to moment direction of mental and physical activity. Kinesthetic learning is then stored in the cerebellum as motor schema.  These stored schemas are a foundation for related image and story sequences presented later.

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It has been shown that links develop between movement centers in the brain and the emotional and pleasure centers of the brain (Kotulak 1996). Therefore, associating movement with learning naturally makes learning more pleasurable. In addition many researchers have demonstrated a significant role between movement processing in the cerebellum and higher cognitive processing in the cerebral cortex. Two Stanford University researchers (Henrietta and Alan Leiner) discovered that the cerebellum takes up one-tenth of the brain volume, but contains over half its neurons and that there are more signal pathways going from the cerebellum to the cortex than the reverse. So kinesthetic activity enhances both the enjoyment of learning and cognitive processing.   

 

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Oral Language Presentations

Oral language presentations introduce or give context to the lesson images, which will later direct problem solving and aide content retention. These presentations are lesson specific and follow related kinesthetic activities. These presentations develop language and story lines that prime semantic processing by the hippocampus.

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The hippocampus is the primary processor of semantic and episodic content. Semantic content provides for language meaning, and episodic content provides for the memory of where and when something happens or is learned. In the maturation of the brain, the hippocampus matures relatively late compared to the amygdala, and cerebellum, the sites of emotion and motor memory (LeDoux 1996). This fact is one of the reasons we can not explicitly remember early events in our life. Our early childhood memory happens to improve for events at about the same time of our first "language explosion". Oral language presentations are necessary for the same reason we talk to infants and toddlers; we are priming the pump, or laying a foundation for meaning that emerges later. The patterns of brain activity that occurs during oral presentations are reproduced during REM sleep (Jensen 1998). This fact supports the practice of waiting a day before requiring students to use information  given in oral presentations. Including a sense of place as well as emotional content will enhance the recall of oral presentations.

 

 

 

 

 

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Lesson imaging

By using image and story sequences to outline content and direct problem solving, lesson imaging intensifies processing in important functional areas of the brain. In addition lesson images stimulates the processing of semantic and episodic content by the hippocampus and the processing of procedural and automatic learning events, as required for simple arithmetic, by the cerebellum.  As in oral presentations, emotional content is included in the lesson images. Through this processing and memory storage, via lesson images, memory networks linking the hippocampus, cerebellum and amygdala may be formed.

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 The kinesthetic activities and oral language presentations are like bookends framing and supporting the concepts and content woven into the lesson images. These concepts and content are sketched or outlined implicitly in the kinesthetic activities and explicitly in the oral presentations. Between these bookends, the lesson images develops the concept and content details. These details, like notebooks, are temporarily shelved or stored in the hippocampus over a period of three to four weeks then transferred, for more long-term storage, to networks in the cerebral cortex, that are more global (Antonio and Hanna Damasio Scientific American 1992). This two step storage scheme supports the importance of the block lesson approach to presenting curriculum to students. The block lesson presents a single subject in a multi-modality, two-hour morning lesson over a three to four week period.

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Working Memory Practice

After the presentation of lesson images, procedure demonstrated with these images must be practiced as vehicles for content recall or problem solving in order to strengthen memory networks.

 

 

 

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Artistic Renderings

Artistic renderings may take various fine art or performance art forms such as painting, sculpting, drama or dance They are made relevant by lifting them from previously presented lesson images. We are attempting with artistic renderings to provide synthetic meaning-filled sensory-cognitive experiences for the students. Meaning requires relevance, emotional content, context and pattern building. These elements of meaning emerge from processing and storage of learning in specific areas of the cerebral cortex. Participation in the arts meet this goal because art activities are synthetic processes that activate all these specific areas of the cerebral cortex.

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Works of art are the subtlest way we code experience and meaning. Processing areas of the cerebral cortex, especially the working memory areas, employ strategies to represent reality and learning comparable to works of art. Artistic rendering stimulates global sensory-cognitive processing in the cerebral cortex depending somewhat on the rendering medium. Experience processed and memories stored at sites in the cerebral cortex are expressed or represented by the working memory of the prefrontal cortex (Patricia S. Goldman-Rakic, Scientific American 1992. As the retrieval and retention of our long-term memories is stimulated by the presence of works of art, the working memory likewise stimulates the retrieval and retention of our long-term memories.

 

 

 

 

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