Be a Student!

Jack-Up Your Professional Development The more you learn, the better you get at your craft. If scientists and medical professionals can keep learning, so can educators. Should structural engineers keep learning? Should medical professionals keep learning? Should firefighters and police officers continue taking relevant classes? Should scientists keep learning and expanding their understanding? Should educators?

The Science I Explored Novelty directly activates the dopamine system, which is responsible for associative learning. The findings have implications for improving learning strategies and for the design of machine learning algorithms. Scientists have known since the 1960's that novelty facilitates associative learning. However, the mechanisms behind this phenomenon remained unknown. To demonstrate that novelty indeed activates dopamine neurons, the researchers exposed mice to both new and familiar smells. "When mice smell a novel stimulus, they get very excited and start sniffing very rapidly. This natural, spontaneous behavior provides a great readout for novelty perception." explains Dr. Cagatay Aydin, postdoc in the group of Sebastian Haesler. With the mouse experiments, the team confirmed dopamine neurons were activated by new smells, but not by familiar ones. The findings demonstrate that dopamine activation by novel stimuli promotes learning. From a very practical perspective, the results remind us to break our routine more often and seek out novel experiences to be better learners.[1]

What type of student are you?

A Situation An educator starts to feel “put upon” and unfulfilled by administration-assigned workshops. The workshops are either a mandate from a distant district idea or a slightly revised version of a topic the teacher has been practicing for years. While the novelty of a revised version of a familiar topic may hold the teacher’s interest for a few days, the luster of it all quickly fades, and the teacher goes back to the same lesson formats and assessments that are tried and true and ultimately lifeless. Improving Your Professional Development Learning new ideas feeds our brain’s need for novelty. First and foremost, decide to take workshops and professional-development classes that discuss scientific breakthroughs in understanding of how the brain learns. You are a professional educator. You need to know how the brain learns. Then, plan to take workshops and classes in any academic area you love and would love to share with your students. Keep taking classes to learn something you love! And if you learn a technique in an art class, share it with your students. Be a proactive learner; take classes just to keep learning. See yourself walking through the doors for the first time into a class you are highly interested in. How do those first steps feel? Say it with me: “I excited to learn something special!”

Quotes

There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole life, from the moment you are born, to the moment you die, is a process of learning.

—Jiddu Krishnamurti

There is always space for improvement, no matter how long you’ve been in the business.

—Oscar De La Hoya

[1] VIB (the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology). "Novelty speeds up learning thanks to dopamine activation." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 5 February 2020. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200205132255.htm.