Brain Friendly Strategies from The Brain-Compatible Classroom by Laura Erlauer

Foster Emotional Wellness

• Reduce stress
• Teach stress management techniques
• Create a sense of community
• Have clear expectations
• Make personal connections with students

Address Body and Movement

• Water, temperature control, lighting, fresh air
• Create opportunities for movement
• Encourage good nutrition

Relevant Content and Student Choice

• Discuss applicability of lessons
• Authentic learning opportunities
• Plan lessons around multiple intelligences and learning styles
• Provide differentiated options
• Allow choice of seating and small groups or partners occasionally

Time Management

• Shift activities in lesson every 20 minutes or less
• Call on students randomly
• Use review through application frequently
• Incorporate time for reflection
• Integrate subjects
• Teach new information in the first 10 min of class
• Use last 10 min to tie new material to previous

Enrichment

• Puzzles, brainteasers
• Problem of the Day
• Always follow a “yes or no” question with “why”
• Don’t give students all the information. All them to contemplate information and draw conclusions
• Ask leading questions
• Use music. Baroque for calming, Make up songs to remember things

Assessment

• Authentic – product based, models, presentations
• Use informal and formal
• Match assessments to the instruction
• Infuse assessment into daily practices
• Informal assessment should always be worth something, but not a lot of points
• Feedback should be prompt, specific and from different sources

Collaboration

• Pair and Share
• Cooperative Learning (train students in roles)
• Foster team work, not competition

Key points in effective learning from Make It Stick by Brown, Roediger, III and McDaniel

 What doesn’t work:

• Rereading text
• Massed practice or cramming
• Highlighting text

What does work:

• Retrieval practice such as flash cards, self quizzing or testing because we are very bad judges of what we really know until testing “calibrates our judgments”
• Space out practice
• Interleave the practice of two or more subjects
• Trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution
• Learning in forms not consistent with your dominant style
• Learning the underlying principles or “rules” that differentiate types of problems. This skill is better acquired through interleaved and varied practice.
• Learning requires a foundation of prior knowledge.
• This process gives new material meaning when you express it in your own words and connect it with what you already know.
• Put new knowledge into a larger context
• Learn to extract key ideas from new material and organize them into a mental model – concept maps