Thoughts on Brown Chapter 4 & 16 and Kumar. Chapter 3

Learners need to feel "invested" in their learning for any long-term retention of knowledge. They must feel an urgency to learn and take responsibility and ownership of that. The teacher must do several things in order for this transfer or sharing of responsibilty to take place. One thing the teacher must do is to make the learning meaningful to the student. I thought of this as activating prior knowledge and building background for them if they do not have sufficient schema going into the lesson. The teacher must also promote autonomy and encourage students taking initiative towards constructing knowledge and extending their thinking. Teachers should also be communicating different strategies to their students that they can use on their own to make meaning. For example, students should be made aware of cognates and to look out for them, how to learn from their mistakes, they should reference what they know from their native language to help them with their target language, using context clues, etc. Teachers should help develop students metacognitive abilities. I was left wondering about two things after reading however. The first thing I am pondering is, how valid are the points about learning styles? Recently, there was an articl eby a group of four psychologists, including professors from UC San Diego and UCLA, that reviewed historical data. That concluded that there is little scientific evidence to support the learning-styles theory and it remains a theory.This article can be found at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/26/learning-styles-theory_n_981845.html They next thing I wondered about was the emphasis Brown put on left- brain and right-brain. This came up recently in a discussion for my graduate curriculum course. My professor for that class said that left-brain right brain theory is extremely inaccurate and over-emphasized. It is simply a metaphor that self-help books blew up and took literally and got translated into truth. Personally, I'd have to do more research on it only because it is still talked about and reference in education. What is the truth related to this issue? I found the following articles related to it but would love to know more. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-myths/201206/why-the-left-brain-right-brain-myth-will-probably-never-die http://rense.com/general2/rb.htm