As I was reading chapter one I was not surprised by the research on plasticity it just reassured what I had previously thought. You know the phrase "we learn something new everyday", well I have always believed this to be true. I see it a lot with the students that I work with. I was doing some research on joint attention in children with Autism and most of the research that I found stated that the best time to teach or improve joint attention in students with Autism was between the ages of around 18 months and 4 years old. However, in reality being able to teach those skills at that age in the school system is very rare mostly because the students are not diagnosed until much later for numerous reasons. The teacher that I was working with (and continue to work with) was teaching two of her students with Autism specific joint attention skills. We worked with this specific student on increasing eye contact with teacher when prompted. Because of the time limit I was not able to progress as far as I wanted to.
This year I will be working with the same students as the teacher goes on maternity leave and after being in the classroom a few times I noticed and big difference in this students rate of attention. The classroom teacher also showed me data that he was improving. This students rate of improvement was slow but there definitely was growth. This just proves to me that the brains always changing and growing.
Now the question about whether my students believe that intelligence is fixed is kind of tricky. I believe that younger students especially those with a positive educational experience believe that they as equally intelligent as their peers. As students reach adolescence they tend to focus more on competition between their peers. Again in this situation I think that previous educational history and classroom environment can effect a students view on intelligence. I also think that culture plays a roll in student's believes on intelligence. Before I came to Baton Rouge I taught in a low income urban culturally diverse neighborhood of Minneapolis, MN. The demographics of the school were about 10% Caucasian, 40% African American, 30% Hispanic and 20% Asian (predominantly Hmong). I found that my caucasian and Hmong students viewed intelligence as something that can be changed where my african american students and hispanic students saw it as something that was fixed.
I think as teachers we have a large influence on changing how our students view their educational abilities. Praise goes a long way!
