The Brain and how we learn fascinates me. I was inspired by a talk given at a TESOL Conference by Janet Zadina in 2009 called Language, Learning, and the Brain. Here are some notes from the presentation that I found online.
Both her work and another scholar's, James Zull (The Art of Changing the Brain), support a lot of my thinking that the way we integrate data and learn is a very complex and non-linear process. We can get data very fast but integrating it is another story that is still being explored. The brain is plastic. Learning is possible and necessary into old age. In an interesting article online she discusses how important emotions, bilingualism, the social aspect, and visualization is. "A growing body of research indicates that it is easier to learn if you visualize information. In addition to providing pictures to be associated with words that are being learned, utilizing visualization is an additional effective tool." The Multiple Pathways Model, Zadina. 
We know that our dreams, for example, are difficult to understand--what are they doing, how do dreams function in learning, why are they important. What do we take in and why? Is bilingualism or multilingualism better for the brain? Of course. Zadina's slogan at the conference was "bilingual is better." Also, I remember there was another talk about dyslexia by someone else, during which I learned that dyslexic brains may actually be called more advanced and these people are more hands-on/kinesthetic learners.
Here is a Ted Talks with Janet Zadina on neuroscience and school reform. She talks about stress, natural disasters, and how music and physical education are helpful to learning. Change is possible and inevitable because of the brain.
I will be writing my next blog about Jeff Duncan-Andrade, a great influence on my thinking about teaching as well.

How to make technology work for you and your students. This is one way to tackle the lecture method of teaching-- flipping your classroom. Math class innovation that could also be used for Language Learning or any other subject where you have multi-levels.

North Carolina State University has a very interesting professional Development solution: The Friday Institute.    Wish we could do this at my college--it looks funded...


Interesting website on Contextualized Teaching and Learning
CORD


Here is Steve Martin in a funny scene from the Pink Panther 2, showing how much patience it takes to learn a language. Scene

I am reading Ken Bain's What the Best College Teachers Do. The focus of any good teaching is the student not the content. The challenge is always engaging the student and the how to effect deep learning. Posing questions, helping students become critical learners, interaction. "Giving students control" was a new idea I learned, although I feel I do this to some extent myself. This reminds me of Freire's idea of dialogue and teaching to what the student needs. I like to give little surveys periodically to my students to ask them what they need from me, what works well, what are their goals for the class. This helps me connect more with them.
Related to the idea of problem-posing (Freire) and getting students to pose questions and be critical, Sonia Nieto referred to Marilyn Cochran-Smith's work on Teachers and Inquiry. A teacher is always learning and inquiring and changing. One teacher Nieto interviewed said she threw out her lesson plans every year because she was always revising her classes and her students were always new. I am very much in the habit of inquiry and classroom research because of a Faculty Inquiry Grant we had in Carpinteria for two years. Not only did we do some great videotaping of students, assessing and inquiring about how we were conducting the class, but we learned more about how to contextualize the class and how important peer to peer learning was for the students. This again goes back to Freire. Students who come to us have so much to give and to share. They are very smart and experienced.

Lessons learned from Carpinteria Fina.
Here is a video about our first group of Carpinteria Fina students at Laney College. The film was made by Roy Robles of Career Ladders Project (very much a part of the Wood Tech program and Carpinteria) video
Here is an example of team teaching--both teachers talking at once...

 We labeled machines and tools in Spanish. Then you can label in English.

I am a big believer in contextualized education. This evening I taught my Carpinteria Fina class at Laney College. Basically, I helped them compose some answers to 8 very basic interview questions and we read some advice on pre, during, and post interview behavior. The students were very happy with the class and they felt they got a lot of useful advice. In this class I contextualize by using what they need to teach English--so by engaging them with a subject like interview questions, they also got an English lesson. I believe this is how we should teach English.

I want to mention an important "methodology" used in Europe. It's called CLIL--which is a higher level of what I am talking about above. In CLIL the language teacher has to be a specialist in another field as well as language. Here is a website about it. CLIL

Sonia Nieto came to Laney yesterday (sponsored by Mills College) Great Speech. She says multicultural education is about knowing your students. She talked about some great K-12 teachers she interviewed. She is actually against studying methodology. 

Here's a website that has more about her ideas.
http://www.learner.org/workshops/tml/workshop1/commentary3.html