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Learning to be smarter with José Antonio Marina and Carmen Pellicer

15-07-2015

On July 1, Santillana published the book La inteligencia que aprende (Intelligence that Learns). Subtitled “Executive intelligence explained to teachers”, the work was written by two authors who are passionate about education, José Antonio Marina and Carmen Pellicer, both directors of the Research Chair on Executive Intelligence and Education at Madrid’s Nebrija University.

The book seeks to add to the field of pedagogy, already informed by other sciences such as neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and anthropology. Teachers, who play a decisive role in cultural evolution, should be aware of the energy that drives them and the wider possibilities offered. "Educating the brain in executive functions can be done in class. For example, the movements of reading and writing are learned, and are constantly reformulating all of the child's brain. And if we do it well, the child is learning to focus their attention while reading and writing,"says Marina.

The authors explore what goes on inside students’ heads with a dual objective: to better understand what is behind their reactions and behavior, and to design our classrooms in a creative and more rigorous way in order to help everyone learn better. For José Antonio Marina, "one of the most important executive functions of pedagogy is being able to focus attention and this should be done from early childhood. In many cases where we are diagnosing attention deficit we are seeing children who have not learned to focus their attention. And that is an executive function that can be taught." 

During ICOT, the event on creative thinking held in Bilbao from June 29 to July 3, the authors presented the book and stressed the importance of training non-cognitive skills as well as the idea that teachers are the educational conscience of society.

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