Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Begin with the Brain
After seeing, listening, and participating in the brain presentation today what are some ways that Mary Jane and I have created a brain compatible learning environment during math enCOUNTers 2008. What can you do in your classrooms to ensure that your students' learning experiences will be brain compatible?
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Giving us the opportunity to process information by doing activities and working with each other demonstrates a brain compatible learning environment. I can make sure that I do this in my classroom so that my students are able to process material throughout the day. I can also provide several learning styles in order to provide positive learning experiences for all types of learners.
We have many opportunities to process what we learn. We also have time to work together on activities to apply what was learned. The information we received about the brain will be very useful in my classroom because now I know that I need to give students time to process the information before loading them down with too much.
Presenting material and then doing the pair/share was very helpful and reminded me to do this more in the classroom. The presentation was a great refresher on the brain works.
This was a great refresher course on how children learn. I think one of the most important things I took away from it is to make sure my environment is completely non-threatening where children feel like they can succeed no matter what. Yesterday we were talking in our group about things we do that we know are not effective-- like raising our voice when things start getting a little crazy in the classroom, but we are only complicating the issue because children's brains may take that as a threat and their thinking brains shut down even more. A simple breather to reflect and process would be far more effective in moving the class back to a learning mode.
After listening to the brain presentation, we were given opportunities to do different activities that allowed us to process the information.
I plan to incorportate more movement (Brain Gym) into my classroom to allow children to process information and add knowledge/memory to the hippocampus (spelling?).
Giving time to process the information after learning. Also, having us move around to get the blood flow circulating to the brain. In the classroom, I will have students march around the room to get the blood flowing. Additionally, I will have them talk in groups after they have learned new information. I will also have a safe enivornment for them to learn in.
Giving time to process always helps. I also need time to move around like my kids to so that was good. It was a nice refresher on what we covered last summer.
Connie says: By providing areas for the different activities throughjout the day so we have movement which stimulates our brian. I also feel the different activities themselves, but also when yesterday you gave us options and choices on what activity we wanted to do, thus we able to make choices as to what types of learners we may be (ex. tactile, etc) and what are individual likes and choices are. These provided positive, interactive experiences!
You have given us a comfortable, non-stressful, and slow paced learning environment so we can be better learners. I am now more aware of processing time since children can't be in more than one part of their brain at a time. I am careful not to give them more information than they can hold.
I have learned that yelling at the kids is not good for their brain because it makes them afraid. They need to be comfortable to function.
Giving us a non-threatening, slow paced enviornment gives us time and confidence to process information. Giving choices helps give us ownership for our learning. I hope to keep these things in mind this next school year. It seems that we are always at a hurried pace trying to get everything done and I need to realize that a more slow steady pace will be a less threatening environment for the kids.
There seems to be a common thread here:"process time"! It is true that it takes time to create a community, to provide a safe learning environment, and to offer opportunities to process in many different ways. This can be a challenging tradeoff when one feels the pressure of "covering" curriculum, or being on a certain page in the math book by a certain day. Deb and I hope that the information gives you the validation and tools to make your classroom a brain-compatible learning environment!
We have been given several opportunties to process information through sharing with others and by doing something with the information. We have also been given several choices which is very empowering to students in that they can chose activities they are most comfortable with before chosing something that may be more difficult.
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