Brain Rules for the Classroom

Brain Rules by John Medina

These are simply my notes put onto slides – very simple, very basic. This is not an attempt at a polished presentation.

Again, these are my notes, not necessarily quotes from the book.

There is not enough time in my life to polish this presentation and apply the “Brain Rules” to it.

If my typoographical erors disturb you, or it upsets you that I gave up trying to find pictures slides, or it bugs you that I was obviously falling asleep during chapter 6 because there is only one note, please put in your yoga DVD instead of watching this slide show...

… or better yet email me ( [email_address] ) to let me know what to fix or if you have any suggestions for copyright free images to use.

All that said, I highly recommend the book. Yes The World is Flat might open your eyes to what our future holds, but this book will introduce to you how you should be teaching your students to be prepared for that future now.

So here we go…enjoy!

“ If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a classroom.” p5

#1 Exercise Exercise Rule #1 Exercise boosts brain power

When kids get to aerobically exercise during school, their brains work better.

Rule #2 Survival Survival Rule #2 The human brain evolved, too

If someone does not feel safe with a teacher, they will not be able to perform as well.p46 If a kid does not feel safe with a teacher, they will not to perform as well.

If you have a student that feels misunderstood because you cannot connect with the way the they learn, the student can become isolated.

Wiring Rule #3 Every Brain is wired differently

Smaller classrooms create better learning environments.

Given that each brain is wired differently, being able to read your students’ mind is a powerful tool.

Getting to know each student allows you to know when students are confused or engaged...

…or whether your teaching is being transformed into learning.

Attention Rule #4 We don’t pay attention to boring things

If your kids are paying attention, they will learn more.

How long before your kids lose interest never to return? 10 minutes

Use messages that grab their attention and are connected to memory, interest, and awareness.

Students use prior experiences to predict whether they should pay attention.

Use novel stimuli – be unusual, unpredictable, or distinctive –to get the kid’s attention

Tap into the student’s emotions to get their attention.

Students will remember emotionally arousing lessons.

Kids are terrific pattern matchers, constantly assessing their environment for similarities, and they tend to remember things if they think they have seen them before.

Start lessons with concepts and go to details. Give them meaning before details.

Getting kids emotionally aroused focuses attention on the “gist’ of an experience at the expense of peripheral details.

Students’ memories record the gist of what they encounter, not by keeping a literal record of the experience.

With the passage of time, students retrieval of gist always trumps their recall of details…

… which means their heads fill with generalized pictures of concepts or events, not with slowly fading minutiae.

Student’s memory is enhanced by creating associations between concepts.

Words presented in a logically organized hierarchal structure are much better remembered than words placed randomly

If students can derive the meaning of the words to one another, we can much more easily recall the details.

Always give the kids the meaning before the details.

What separates novices from experts?

“ Experts knowledge is not simply a list of facts and formulas that are relevant to their domain; instead their knowledge is organized around core concepts or ‘big ideas’ that guide their thinking about their domains.”

Research shows we cannot multitask—we are biologically incapable of processing attention-rich inputs simultaneously.

Students who are interrupted take 50% longer to accomplish a task, and makes 50% or more errors.

Giving your kids too much information without enough time to digest it sacrifices learning for expediency.

Break classes into 10 minute segments. First minute the gist, the next nine the details

Teacher should start with a where we are going at the start, with where we are throughout – stops students from having to figure it out and multitask.

At the end of each ten minutes there should be a hook, looking backwards, or forward – and always triggering an emotion.

Short Term Memory Rule #5 Repeat to remember

Students forget 90% of what they learn in class within 30 days. The majority of this forgetting occurs within the first few hours after class.

Memory worked best if the environmental conditions at retrieval mimicked the environmental conditions at encoding.

Information is best remembered when it is elaborate, meaningful, and contextual. The quality of the encoding stage – those earliest moments of learning – is one of the single greatest predictors of later learning success.

When you are trying to drive a piece of information into a kids memory system, make sure they know what it means.

First moments of a class are vitally important.

Memory of an event is stored in the same places that were initially recruited to perceive the learning event.

The more the brain structures involved during the initial introduction to the information, the easier it is to recall the information.

Teach information and skills in the same way, in the same environment, and with the same tools in which they will be tested.

Your chances of remembering something increase if you reproduce the environment in which you first put it into your brain.

Long Term Memory Rule #6 Remember to Repeat

Memory may not be fixed at the moment of learning, but repetition, doled out in specifically time intervals, is fixative.

Thinking or talking about a lesson immediately after it has occurred enhances memory for that event.

Memory loss in the first hour or two after a class can be lessened by deliberate repetition.

The probability of confusion is increased when content is delivered in unstoppable, unrepeated waves, poured into students as if they were wooded forms.

Better to space out repetitions than to do them all at once.

Deliberately re-expose yourself to information more elaborately if you want the retrieval to be of higher quality.

Deliberately re-expose yourself to information more elaborately and in fixed spaced intervals if you want the retrieval to be the most vivid it can be.

Learning occurs best when new information is incorporated gradually into the memory store rather than when it is jammed in all at once.

The brains excitement when introduced to something new will last only an hour or two.

If it is not re-energized with 90 minutes the excitement will vanish and will re-set to zero ready to accept the next signal that might come its way.

How do you get it to stay permanent? The information must be repeated after a period of time has passed.

It could take years for your brain to put something into its long-term storage.

Forgetting allows us to prioritize events.

We assign them the same priority as events critical to our survival. If we deem them as unimportant, we forget them.

If students forget something, it was because the weren’t presented in a way to show the students that it was important in their life.

Sleep Rule #7

Sleep loss = Brain Drain

Sleep loss means mind loss. Sleep loss cripples thinking, in just about everyway you can measure thinking.

Sleep loss hurts attention, executive function, immediate memory, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning ability, and general math knowledge.

Eventually, sleep loss affects fine and gross motor control movements.

Sleep is intimately involved in learning.

Sleep hormones are at their maximum levels in the teenage brain making them want to sleep more in the morning.

Stress Rule #8 Stressed brains don’t learn the same way

After being shut down again and again there is a learned helplessness.

Certain types of stress hurt learning, some types boost learning.

Bad stress = cause of stress is out of student’s control

Our stress response systems were shaped to solve problems that lasted for seconds, not years.

How long does the stress of a school day last? Mom and dad divorcing? A Bully?

Prolonged stress effects memory, math skills, concentration, problem solving, and almost any other type of cognitive skills that can be tested.

One of the greatest predictors of performance in school is the emotional stability of the home.

The ability of the student to do well in your class might have nothing to do with your teaching.

In a knowledge based economy where problem solving and creativity is key, stress is a major issue that must be dealt with.

Sensory Integration Rule #9 Stimulate more of the senses

Groups in multisensory environments always do better than groups in unisensory environments. They have more accurate recall…

…even twenty years later.

The following is Richard Mayer’s rules for multimedia presentations:

1) Multimedia principle: Students learn better from words and pictures than words alone

2) Temporal Contiguity Principle: Students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented simultaneously rather than successively.

3) Spatial contiguity principle: Students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented near to each other rather than far from each other on the page or screen

4) Coherence principle: Students learn better when extraneous material is excluded.

5) Modality principal: Students learn better from animation and narration than from animation and on-screen text

Smell-exposed groups can retrieve twice as many memories as the controls.

Most critical time to use multisensory approach in classroom is during an introduction.

The right smell in a store can double sales. Can the right smell in a classroom “double” learning?

Vision Rule #10 Vision trumps all other senses

Vision is probably the best single tool we have for learning anything.

People will remember 10% of information presented orally tested 72 hours after exposure…

…add an image and it goes up to 65%.

One of the reasons that words are less efficient than images is because the brain sees words as lots of tiny pictures.

Reading creates a bottleneck --- text chokes the brain.

To our cortex, there is no such thing as words.

Simple, two dimensional pictures are quite adequate. If a picture is too complex it could take away from the transfer of information.

Gender Rule #11 Male and Female Brains are different

Girls are better at verbal memory tasks, verbal fluency tasks, and speed of articulation.

When girl friends communicate with each other, they lean in, maintain eye contact, and do a lot of talking.

Girls use sophisticated verbal talents to cement relationships.

Boys cement relationships by hitting one another ; )

Boys say “Do this.”

Girls say “Let’s do this.”

Males and females process emotions differently.

Females perceive their emotional landscape with more data points – detail – and see it in greater resolution, women have more information to which they can react.

Exploration Rule #12 We are powerful and natural explorers

Exploration creates the need for more discovery so that more joy can be experienced.

How to get more exploring into schools?

1) Consistent exposure to the real world.

2) Consistent exposure to those that operate in the real world.

3) Consistent exposure to real research.

“The greatest Brain Rule of all is something I cannot prove or characterize…it is the importance of curiosity.”

Again, I know this presentation did not follow the “Brain Rules.” I simply ran out of time. But if you have any suggestions for images or other ideas I would be happy to use them! [email_address]

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Brain Rules for the Classroom

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