Thinking back on my three weeks spent at Bryn Mawr’s Summer Science Institute for K-12 Teachers, one of the most important things I learned was how to do a proper “brain drain,” a listing of words or phrases that immediately come to mind when a certain word is said. So why not start off with a bit of brain draining to help describe the Institute and what it accomplished?

Connected

""I suspect there are features of the higher order organization of neurons that need to be included among the "underlying rules" to achieve a better understanding of depression, both conceptually and for therapeutic purposes."  ... PG, An expanded neurobiology of depression, June, 2009

Sorry it took a little while to get this posted, but with little league starting and getting ready for the new school year I was distracted by a few things.  But  I think what has stuck and will stay that way (at least until the story changes) is the idea that we need to listed to all sides of the story (remember we are all "climbing the same mountain just from different sides").

Twenty or so years ago, when my kids were in elementary school, I visited a class to talk about my profession.  I said I was a scientist, and asked the class if they knew what a scientist was.  "Its somebody who knows things," one student said.  No, I said, its somebody who knows what we don't know and asks new questions based on that.

 Week One

I’ve found that over the course of the week that we are not only a group of diverse individuals seeking to expand our knowledge and understanding of the educational and learning process, but that we are also a group of self-stimulating neurons—making up a working nervous system, a brain, if you will—that is capable of forming new paths for our learning and thoughts to travel. Individually we are all capable of producing, to some degree, small action potentials, little sparks of neuronal activity that have the potential to become something bigger.

Weekly Observations of the Brain, Science, and Inquiry-Based Education Institute from Summer 2010

• Week 1
• Week 2
• Week 3

Week 1 Observations

Week 2 Observations

Week 3 Observations