WHAT WE'VE LEARNED

This year we studied the book, Brain Rules, throughout the year. We used the format of meeting twice a month, on the 2nd and 4th Thursdays of each month. We took one chapter and studied it for those two weeks, then came back together as a group (about 15 of us consistently) and talked about our own learning and the implications as classroom teachers.

Below you'll find the synthesized notes and implications based upon discussions. Keep in mind that we didn't finish all the chapters this year. We chose the ones best-suited for education. We didn't cover Rule ##2, #7, #8, #11, #12. If you're curious on what those brain rules are, we encourage you to purchase or check out the book.

RULE #1: Exercise Boosts Brainpower

OUR LEARNING:

• "A lifetime of exercise can result in a sometimes astonishing elevation in cognitive performance, compared with those who are sedentary."

• "The role of exercise on mood is so pronounced that many psychiatrists have begun adding a regimen of physical activity to the normal course of therapy."

• "Kids pay better attention to their subjects when they've been active. Kids are less likely to be disruptive in terms of their classroom behavior when they're active. Kids feel better about themselves, have higher self-esteem, less depression, less anxiety. All of those things can impair academic performance and attentiveness." 

We talked about the need to get our students moving more often. We had already read the Attention chapter and knew that we don't have a lot of time before kids check out of what we want them to learn. Not that we're going to do 100 push ups every ten minutes but . . . it has made us more cognizant about what we can do in the classroom to ensure we are maximizing our time by getting kids moving. As we have looked at our schedule for next school year, we've implemented a few more recesses for grades that haven't had them because, according to Dr. Yancey, kids do better academically that receive more opportunities to get out and move.

RULE #3: Wiring: Every brain is wired differently.

OUR LEARNING:

• "Learning results in physical changes in the brain, and these changes are unique to each individual. Not even identical twins having identical experiences possess brains that wire themselves exactly the same way. And you can trace the whole thing to experience."
• "Given these data, does it make sense to have school systems that expect every brain to learn like every other? The current system is founded on a series of expectations that certain learning goals should be achieved by a certain age. Students of the same age show a great deal of intellectual variability. These differences cna profoundly influence classroom performance. Lockstep models based simply on age are guaranteed to create a counterproductive mismatch to brain biology. YOU CANNOT CHANGE THE FACT THAT THE HUMAN BRAIN IS INDIVIDUALLY WIRED."

One of the biggest pieces we discussed with this chapter was permission to understand that all brains are wired differently and that some students won't be able to understand the depth of a concept, for example, as well as others and that's okay. We recognize that every brain is unique. The massive challenge, naturally, is how do we find what works for that one individual student and can we get that child the help he/she needs?

RULE #4: Attention: We don't pay attention to boring things

OUR LEARNING: 

• In everyday life, we use previous experience to predict where we should pay attention.
• That's how memory works . . . by recording the gist of what we encounter, not by retaining a literal record of the experience.
• Memory is enhanced by creating associations between concepts.
• Always start with key ideas and, in hierarchical fashion, form the details around these larger notions.
• Lecture Design: Modules that last in 10 min segments
• Each segment would cover a single core concept...always large, always general, always filled with "gist" AND ALWAYS EXPLAINABLE IN ONE MINUTE.
• It's important throughout the lesson to have liberal repetitions of "where we are"
• At the 9 minute, 50 sec. mark, make sure to set the ECS (the hook) to tie into the next concept or segment.

This chapter was some of the most important learning we did in this study. It made us very cognizant about our delivery and the time and structure of which we are delivering the material. How many of us to way too long before we give students think or analysis time, along with time to talk to one another about the new material they've learned? And as this chapter implies, we have to make the learning relevant to the child, linking to real world concepts and connections. Let's face it, we have some boring material that we have to cover, but if we keep this brain rule in mind and really look at our delivery of material, we can capitalize on the best learning environment.

RULE #5: Short Term Memory: Repeat to Remember

OUR LEARNING:

• We now know that the space between repetitions is the critical component for  transforming temporary memories into more persistent forms. Spaced learning is greatly superior to massed learning.
• The brain has a natural predilection for pattern matching. Information is more readily processed if it can be immediatlely assoicated with inofrmation already present in the learner's brain. Give students examples because providing examples makes the information more elaborative, more complex, better encoded, and therefore better learned.
• The events that happen the first time you are exposed to given information play a disproportionately greater role in your ability to accurately retrieve it at a later date. If you are trying to get information across to someone, your ability to create a compelling introduction may be the most important single factor in the later success of your mission.
• You can improve your chances of remembering something if you reproduce the environment in which you first put it into your brain.

The big piece for us from the chapter are found in bullets 2 and 3. We have to provide student constant examples (as many real world as possible) and make sure we have a compelling introduction since this sets up the learning for the entire lesson.

RULE #6: Long Term Memory: Remember to Repeat

OUR LEARNING:

• The relationship between repetition and memory is clear. Deliberately re-expose yourself to the information if you want to retrieve it later. Deliberately re-expose yourself to the information more elaborately if you want the retrieval to be higher quality. Learning occurs best when new information is incorporated gradually into the memory store rather than when it is jammed in all at once.
• The way to make long-term memory more reliable is to incorporate new information gradually and repeat it in timed intervals.

RULE #9: Sensory Integration

OUR LEARNING: 

• Multimedia principle: Students learn better from words and pictures than from words alone. Students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented near to each other rather than far from each on the page or screen. 
• Students learn better from animation and narration from animation and on-screen text.
• The opening moments of a presentation are critical, and incorporating multisensory presententations can really help.
• Our senses work together which means that we learn best if we stimulate several senses at once.

This chapter really hit home how we need to incorporate multimedia into what we do. The practical side to that though is that it's admittedly tough to do initially. Setting up multimedia takes time and planning, something we're already strapped for. We are, however, moving forward to ensure that every classroom has project the computer's screen as well as the document camera's. That's our first step.

RULE #10: Vision: Vision trumps all other senses.

OUR LEARNING: 

• The more visual you make something, the easier it is to recall. Tests performed years ago showed that people could remember more than 2,500 pictures with at least 90% accuracy several days post-exposure, even though subjects saw each picture for about 10 seconds. Accuracy rates a year later still hovered around 63%.
• If information is presented orally, people remember about 10% when tested 72 hours later. That figure goes up to 65% if you add a picture!
• We pay lots of attention to color, shape and size, and we pay special attention to objects in motion.
• Vision is by far our most dominant sense, taking up half of our brain's resources.

This chapter, like Sensory Integration, has huge impacts for us when we present material to students. We have to remember that combining a picture with what we are doing hits home with memory. We have to try and incorporate as much visually stimulating support material for our core delivery as possible.