This document discusses why teachers should understand how the brain works. It notes that coaches must understand how the body works to do their jobs well, and teachers are "brain coaches" who should understand the brain. The document lists several things brains need, including water, sleep, and a relaxed environment. Stress can damage brain cells over time. It then lists 12 classroom design suggestions based on brain research, such as providing a variety of spaces, linking indoor and outdoor areas, and utilizing the community as a learning environment. The document concludes by recommending reading about memory and attention in eLearning design.

1. What’s the Big Deal
with the Brain?
or why should teachers care.
Dr. Minnie Ladores
June 2012

2. Consider this:
How well must coaches know
how the body works?
How the muscles, joints, and
tendons work?
What to do and
what NOT to do?
Why?

3. Now think: How well should teachers
know how the brain works?

4. You’re a brain coach!

5. You know brains need...

6. water
dehydrated brains can’t think
Our brains depend on proper hydration to
function optimally. Brain cells require a
delicate balance between water and various
elements to operate, and when you lose too
much water, that balance is disrupted. Your
brain cells lose efficiency.
Read more: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/you-
illuminated/201010/why-your-brain-needs-water

7. sleep
Neuroscientists now believe sleep is
not only crucial to brain development,
but is also necessary to help
consolidate the effects of waking
experience – by converting memory
into more permanent and/or enhanced
forms.

8. a relaxed
environment
As science gains greater insight into the
consequences of stress on the brain,
the picture that emerges is not a pretty
one. A chronic overreaction to stress
overloads the brain with powerful
hormones that are intended only for
short-term duty in emergency situations.
Their cumulative effect damages and
kills brain cells.

9. There are instructional design
principles based on brain research.

10. Here’s a dozen classroom design
suggestions from Jeffrey Lackney’s article.
Source: http://www.designshare.com/Research/BrainBasedLearn98.htm

11. Rich-stimulating environments – color, texture, "teaching architecture",
displays created by students (not teacher) so students have connection
and ownership of the product.

12. Changing displays – changing the environment, interacting with the environment
stimulates brain development. Provide display areas that allow for stage set type
constructions to further push the envelope with regard to environmental change.

13. Safe places – reduce threat, especially in urban settings.

14. Personalized space – the concept of homebase needs to be emphasized more than the metal locker or
the desk; this speaks to the principle of uniqueness; the need to allow learners to express their self-
identity, personalize their special places, and places to express territorial behaviors.

15. Active/passive places – students need places for reflection and
retreat away from others for intrapersonal intelligence as well as
places for active engagement for interpersonal intelligence.

16. Places for group learning – breakout spaces, alcoves, table groupings to
facilitate social learning and stimulate the social brain; turning
breakout spaces into living rooms for conversation.

17. Variety of places – provide a variety of places of different shapes, color, light, nooks & crannies.
Dunn & Dunn (Learning Styles) recommend having a soft, informal space with pillows and couches on
one side of the room; and desks on the other half. This photo is from a classroom in Denmark.

18. Have all resources available – provide educational, physical and the variety of settings in close
proximity to encourage rapid development of ideas generated in a learning episode. This is an
argument for wet areas/ science, computer-rich workspaces all integrated and not segregated.
Multiple functions and cross-fertilization of ideas are primary goal.

19. Linking indoor and outdoor places – movement, engaging the motor
cortex linked to the cerebral cortex, for oxygenation.

20. The community-at-large as the optimal learning environment – need to find ways to fully
utilize all urban and natural environments as the primary learning setting. The school as
the fortress of learning needs to be challenged and conceptualized more as a resource-rich
learning center that supplements life-long learning. Technology, distance learning,
community and business partnerships, home-based learning, all need to be explored as
alternative organizational structures for educational institutions of the present and future.

21. How about designing for eLearning?
Read Chapters 4 and 5 and see what Dirksen has
to say about memory and attention.