Pedagogical reflections on the role of neuroscience in teacher education 3.0
Diana Olivieri
This paper aims at the teaching dimension, by referring to the important role played by neuroscience in inspiring the teaching enterprise and educational reform. Moreover, teachers demonstrate the need to receive training that allows them to adopt strategies aligned with current knowledge related to neurocognitive development and neuroplasticity, in favor of an increasingly evidence-based practice. Therefore, in the context of professional development 3.0, which considers the professional and personal aspects of teaching to be inseparable, it is essential to design an effective approach to support teachers’ learning, which draws on the needs expressed by the teachers themselves. Doing so through the creation of communities of practice, allows to stimulate the so-called collective teaching efficacy, that is, the belief to make a difference in students’ lives, without exception. By implementing a short survey to detect the preferences of pre-service and in-service teachers for various topics in neurodidactics, in sight of creating an on-demand laboratory for enriching capabilities directly calibrated to their requests, 90% of respondents demonstrated significant interest for addressing strategies aimed at promoting ways to trigger and consolidate learning (attention and memory), whereas almost no interest emerged for metacognitive-motivational training, which seems to them still a distant possibility.
Keywords
Neurodidactics, Teacher education, Collective Teaching Efficacy, Evidence-based practice, Professional development.