Neurons are nerve cells. Thirty thousand of them can fit into a space the size of a pinhead. A typical neuron is composed of a main cell body with nucleus and two branches; the outgoing is called the “axon” while the incoming branch is called the “dendrite.” The connecting point for the two is called the “synapse.”

According to Pat Wolfe, all information processing in the brain consists of neurons “talking” to one another. Learning is defined as “the establishment of new synapses” and the “modification of connectivity among neurons.”

According to Cardellichio and Field (Educational Leadership, March 1997), seven strategies can help to enrich students' environment to help them make new connections or “neural branching”: (1) hypothetical thinking; (2) reversal (what happens if we reversed...?); (3) application of different symbol systems (e.g., explaining the Pythagorean Theorem in words and pictures); (4) analogies (looking for correspondences); (5) analysis of point of view; (6) completion (filling in incomplete elements); and (7) web analysis (uncovering the complex multiple effects extending from a single source).

 

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