HSSE 'Brown Bag' Seminar - Thinking in Teaching and Learning: The Mind, Metacognition and Neuroscience

Speaker : Dr Frank CT Voon
Date : Wednesday, 29 April
Time : 10.30 am - 12.30 pm
Venue : 3-02-27

About the Topic

How do we think, what do we learn and why do we forget?
The brain is structure. The mind is process.
Where in the brain (in which parts?) are the processes that engage in higher order thinking?
What goes on in our minds when we are thinking?
Are the parts and processes different when we teach and when we learn?
Does emotion have a role in cognition?

Neuroscience teaches us about neurons and the neural circuitry involved in learning and memory formation. Brain research using newly developed neuroimaging techniques has uncovered and mapped cognitive areas that are involved in both the intellectual processes of thinking and the emotional processes of feeling, as well as their interrelationships with each other.

This two hour symposium is structured along three conceptual parts: Thinking-Doing-Being. These conceptual parts deal basically in sequential order with new knowledge (of thinking), new skills (of doing) and most importantly a different attitude (of being) that teachers might want to consider in order to get across the theory-practice gap encountered in the real-life classroom. Spending a half-hour on each of these conceptual parts may enable us to reach a deeper level of thinking and knowledge, as we embark on a journey of thinking about teaching and learning, one that promises to be insightful, engaging and enlightening.

About the speaker

Dr Frank CT Voon teaches medical and dental students, doctors, dentists and surgeons at the National University of Singapore. He is a medical doctor, anatomist, embryologist, information technologist. In February this year, he spoke to an international audience about the physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual growth of human beings and the technological evolution of human civilisation in terms of neuroanatomy, cognition and the mind in relation to attention and memory. For this talk, he has further developed those ideas for education in terms of the thinking processes involved in learning, recall and forgetting that are based on recent advances in the scientific understanding of visual recognition, symbolic representation and cognitive prediction.