The Think Tank Tower Tour: Heather
By: Think Tank Team
Editors’ note: We thought this would be a good time to tell you who we are. Not counting our inner stable contributors, this magazine has a staff of seven, living all over the world, who gather at Think Tank Towers in Waikiki every month to produce this magazine. The MindBrainEd Think Tanks are not funded, nor are the contributors or editors paid, so they produce this magazine out of love for language teachers and students.
Why? The reason lies in our training as teachers. Until the eighties, language teacher training, in college, at conferences, and in the literature, was focused on the language, in other words, linguistics. Before acronyms like TESL or EAL eventually came out, language teaching was actually known as “Applied Linguistics.”
However, language teachers everywhere realized that their training in syntax parsing and case grammars was of little benefit in their classrooms and demanded more information about learning in general. The spotlight then shifted from language to learners, especially in terms of motivation, communicative approaches, language functions and notions, and so on. And this helped.
Nonetheless, there were two areas of language learning that still remained in the dark: how the brain actually does language and how it does learning. This was not known in neuroscience either. But at the turn of the century, some of us noticed that neuroscience was starting to figure that out, as well as unravel attention, disabilities, emotion, and so much more. Unfortunately, these discoveries were not being taught to us. Because it is so new, and because neuroscience is so hard to understand, most teacher training programs still lag in teaching these things. The price we pay for this deficit, however, is the well-being of our learners.
Now, however, scattered all over the world, there are a few teachers who are trying to change this; teachers who study neuroscience and psychology and try to pass it on to their peers in an understandable way. They speak at conferences (if they can get accepted), they include brain studies in their research, and they write articles. For teachers like that in language teaching, we, The MindBrainEd Think Tanks, are their home base and launch pad.
This month, meet our newest member: Heather!
Like many other teachers in 2020, I was keenly interested in making online teaching and learning work for my students and me. Even after a semester of online teaching under my belt, I was still scouring the Internet for good tips.
One day in late fall, an email from Cambridge ELT arrived in my inbox with links to a couple of resources. One was a recording of a presentation Curtis had done that September entitled Keeping what matters: What we can learn from the neuroscience of learning. The title sparked my curiosity because I had already read loads of advice on getting students to turn on their cameras and combating Zoom fatigue and the like, but neuroscience?!?—that was not on my radar.
In his presentation, Curtis didn’t just talk about Zoom fatigue, he also talked about Zoom bias, which I hadn’t heard of before. In fact, in his 45-minute presentation, he touched on a lot of things that were new for me, like the social brain. And I bet it will come as no surprise to regular readers that he also mentioned this magazine, the MindBrainEd Think Tank. Well, I was hooked.
I proceeded to read Think Tank issues—voraciously. I think I started with the Social Brain and moved on to Online Learning, and then just read, read, read, and tried to integrate what I was learning about brain science into my teaching. A couple months later, I felt brave enough to subscribe and—gasp—fill out the Think Tank reader’s survey. Soon afterwards Curtis contacted me, and the rest is history.
Hobbies: Heather has always loved reading. Whether at home, in a café, or on the train, she’s generally got her nose in a book. Sipping a cup of tea, she loses herself in adventures on far-off worlds. She also enjoys taking walks in nature and — unsurprisingly — brings a book along on beautiful days.
Office: [Verdant Workspace] You can find Heather’s office in the garden on the roof — perfect for writing on her laptop in the early morning. When it rains, she visits the other editors.