Sessions

A Look at the Social Brain Will Change Your Ideas about ELT Forever

Through fMRI research, Matthew Lieberman discovered a large network in our brain devoted to figuring out other people's thoughts and intentions: the mentalizing network. The social brain is also important for learning and is active anytime the working memory network, which we use for analytical thinking, is not. Lieberman calls it our Superpower, but he also defines our Kryptonite: traditional education. Educators tend to see the social aspect of learning as a frivolity, or ignore it altogether. For designing rich online classes, synchronous or not, the social brain has much to teach us, from why we experience "Zoom fatigue," why we might advise aspirin for that student that just broke up, to ways to use Dancing Matt to get learners into the right "brain state" for language learning. Curtis Kelly (EdD.) is a professor at Kansai University, a founder of the JALT BRAIN SIG, and a columnist for the KoTESOL Teaching English Connection. He's a brain nerd. In pursuit of his life mission, "to relieve the suffering of the classroom," he has written numerous textbooks, 30 books, including the Cambridge Writing from Within series.