Whole Brain Learning Techniques: Engaging All Parts of the Brain for Effective Learning

The concept of Whole Brain Teaching (WBT) isn’t new, but it deserves more attention. WBT is a teaching method that engages all parts of the brain in learning, meaning students are more likely to retain information and be successful in school. Whole brain teaching strategies have been shown to be more effective than traditional methods.

The Core Idea Behind Whole Brain Teaching

WBT is based on the idea that we learn best when all parts of the brain are engaged. This means that students who use Whole Brain Teaching techniques are more likely to remember what they’ve learned and be successful in school. The premise behind whole-brain teaching strategies is that it motivates areas of the brain that direct instruction often doesn’t reach.

When we use whole-brain teaching in the classroom, it encourages both sides of the brain to work together. The idea is that the motor cortex and the prefrontal cortex work together to control our movements and thoughts. When we use whole-brain teaching strategies, we are stimulating both of these areas at the same time. This type of learning increases a student’s ability to problem-solve, think creatively, and remember information for longer periods of time. You see, when both sides of the brain are working together, it’s more likely that a student will be engaged in what they’re learning.

Whole Brain Teaching vs. Traditional Methods

The difference between a standard lecture-discussion model and whole brain teaching rules is a multi-sensory approach to not only challenge kids but promote the use of active learning. Gone are the days when children can sit passively and learn. They are physically not built for it anymore and add in the time period of COVID where they quickly learned what they did (and didn’t) need to do to learn, and it’s no wonder that our teaching style needs to update to reflect that.

When we use more than one modality to engage kids, we are stimulating different areas of the brain. The multi-sensory learning system in WBT classes rallies around all different types of student behaviors and improves student learning.💫💫

Key Strategies in Whole Brain Teaching

One of the best things about whole brain teaching is that it’s flexible and can be used in a variety of ways to fit the needs of your students. There is no right or wrong way to use whole brain teaching, so feel free to experiment and find what works best for you and your students. You might find something outside of the box that works better than you could have imagined, or maybe you have to tweak it a bit as you go. Regardless, the important thing is that you are using strategies that engage your students and help them learn more effectively. By challenging kids, be it through key instructional units, specific vocabulary, a series of conversations, etc.

Here are some strategies:

The Hook: This is a great way to start a lesson and get your students engaged from the very beginning.
Chunking: This strategy involves breaking down information into smaller, more manageable chunks.
Interactive Notebooks: This is a great way to get students involved in the learning process and help them to better understand the material.

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Cooperative Learning: This is a great way to get students working together and helps them to better understand the material.

The Big Seven

Whole Brain Teaching is an approach designed toward maximizing student engagement, and focusing on the way the brain is really designed to learn. It is an integrated method combining effective classroom management and pedagogically sound approaches to student engagement that are effective with a wide range of student learning populations vetted through 15 years of classroom application. Whole Brain Teaching is intended to be flexible, adaptable by any teacher to their own teaching methods, and is based on seven core components, referred to as The Big Seven. The speed with which a teacher introduces these to a class depends on the comfort level of the teacher and the students. Never try to add something new until both the teacher and the class are ready to move on.

Attention Getter (Class-Yes)

WBT Basics provides a simple starting point for teachers new to Whole Brain Teaching. Start with the Attention Getter (Class-Yes).Activate the Brain Engager (Mirror Words).It is intended to get the attention of your class with one word. There are a lot of attention getters out there, from flashing the lights, to raising a hand and waiting for the class to stop talking and listen. All of these are missing one critical element to be effective- the students! In most of these methods the teacher is the sole active participant, and the students are completely passive. Students are taught that when the teacher says ‘class!’ they respond ‘yes!’ The hook is that the students have to say yes in the same way the teacher says class. For example, if the teacher says ‘class-class’ the students’ respond ‘yes-yes’. Teachers should use as many variations of ‘class’ as they can think of. This keeps the technique interesting and unpredictable for the students.

Walking down the hallways of my school, a smile breaks across my face as I hear “Oh Class, Oh Class” and a choral response of “Oh Yes, Oh Yes!” A teacher cannot teach if a student is not paying attention. In order to gain students’ attention, the teacher begins with “Class-Yes”. The teacher says, “Class” and the students are taught to respond with “Yes”. Yes is more than a word that is spoken, though. The teacher explicitly teaches the expectations that come with a “Yes” response. They freeze what they are doing, turn and track the teacher, and fold their hands in front of them. If a student does not complete all three components, the teacher reviews and allows students to practice what should happen during the attention getter.

Rules

Classroom Rules, a video demonstrating the Rules' gestures…Rules are an important element in any effective classroom. A new teacher in particular needs to establish expectations for behavior. The problem many teachers have is that they post their rules on a poster, or a bulletin board, go over them a time or two near the beginning of the year, and then are surprised when the students do not know the rules months later. Once again the students are not a part of the rules. In Whole Brain Teaching there are five simple rules, each has a gesture associated with it, and each one is an intimate part of the classroom learning environment. For example, Rule Two is ‘raise your hand for permission to speak.’ As you practice the rule you raise your hand, and then bring it down and make a hand-puppet like speaking motion with your hand. As one might imagine, it is the most violated rule in a classroom setting. Typically, if a student is speaking while the teacher is addressing the class, the teacher calls the student down and asks them to stop speaking. This can open up a power struggle that can derail the class, or at least lead to hard feeling by the student for the teacher. With this approach instead the teacher addresses the class, calling them up with a class-yes, then the teacher says ‘Rule Two!’ and the whole class practices Rule Two. This way the teacher has not embarrassed the speaker, every student is involved in practicing the rule, and class has been interrupted for a matter of seconds with no possibility for power struggles.

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Scoreboard

One of the most important elements is the Scoreboard Game. This is a classroom engagement game that your students want you to play, but the teacher cannot really lose. In the Scoreboard Game a scoreboard is drawn on one side of the board, and can be divided for different classes for secondary teachers or teachers who rotate classes. Elementary scoreboards are set up with Smiley versus Frowny. Secondary classrooms are set up teacher versus students. This ‘game’ rewards kids for doing what the teacher expects. In the secondary environment the only way for a rebellious teenager to rebel is to do what they teacher asks, scoring for the students, keeping the teacher from getting a point. Teachers usually provide a reward for students winning the game on a daily, or weekly basis. However, the rewards are not extrinsic. Recommended rewards include a little less homework, the ability for students to choose their own seats, or time to play a game.

Teach-OK and Switch

Try Teach-OK and then add Switch. For any teacher maximizing student comprehension is a vital part of the job. Most teachers rely on the traditional methods that were used when they were coming through school themselves. Typical activities in the traditional approach, worksheets, notes, or lecture, engage only one portion of a student’s brain when creating memories for content. Students can learn information using all of their senses, but they may learn through some senses more easily than others. A valuable approach for a teacher would obviously be an approach that provides the information to the students using more than one sensory system. The Teach-OK element of Whole Brain Teaching does just that. Using this method a teacher talks about an important concept or idea for a couple of minutes. Then the teacher has the class copy his/her gestures, and teaches the main ideas contained in that short segment of lecture. Then the students turn to face their partner, and teach their partners the same information that the teacher just covered, and they can then take a note on the information if the teacher desires. The students are now part of the teaching that is going on, and they are delivering content to one another using all their senses. As any teacher knows, you learn the most about any content when you are the one who has to teach it.

Once the students have learned the Teach-OK approach the teacher can add Switch. The Teach-OK is performed that same as listed above, however, this time one student partner teaches while the other mimics the teacher partner’s gestures. In a moment when the teacher calls out ‘switch!’ the students respond ‘switch!’ and the teaching partners switch roles.

Mirror Words

Activate the Brain Engager (Mirror Words). “Mirror Words,” shouts the teacher, reminding me of Mary Katherine Gallagher doing the “Superstar” skit on Saturday Night Live. Her hands fly up looking like rearview mirrors and the students do the same. Everyone participates because she has already gained their attention.

One-Minute Lessons

Choose how you will deliver content: big gestures, tiny gestures, fast gestures, slow motion, etc. Speak using gestures for about one minute of Direct Instruction, talking only about one new point. Breaking your lesson into Lesson Chunks means you only present one new point at a time. Employ Collaborative Learning (Teach Ok) as students teach their neighbor your lesson using gestures. Deliver Point #1 on each card, then Point # 2 and so on.One-minute lessons are facilitated for direct instruction. Planning for instruction includes gestures that go with each major concept and that word/concept keeps the same gesture throughout the entire lesson. Students then have an association of a word to a gesture and the information that is related to both. For example, when a teacher is teaching a noun, she puts her hands together in front of her indicating it is an object. In whole brain teaching, the teacher breaks up information into short chunks, using large hand gestures, varying the intonation of her voice by speaking loudly and then softly, quickly then slowly. The greater the variance, the more likely students are to recall and use the information. The teacher leads the students through one chunk and they repeat, doing the same motions and saying the same words.

Teach! Okay!

For this segment of the lesson, the teacher proclaims “Teach!” and the students respond with “Okay!” The students then face a partner and paraphrase the learning, which is a skill within its own right. Formative assessment is happening every minute as the teacher combs the room, listening for the paraphrase. Increasing rigor and complex thinking can happen in this phase of the learning.

The Brain's Three Stages of Learning

Teaching with the brain in mind means teaching to the whole child-a holistic approach that includes cognitive, behavioral, and emotional strategies. Brain-friendly instruction engages three stages of learning: readiness, construction, and consolidation. These are biological stages that brains need for student success. They are not optional.

Readiness

You must foster student brain preparedness before you begin trying to make learning happen. Readiness is a social, cultural, biological, and internal "state." Your brain always triggers a "yes/maybe/no" switch for the learning process. You are with friends, or not. You care or you don't care. Your environment is culturally friendly or oppressive. You are hungry, stressed, sick, or feeling good.

Educators have many ways to prepare a student for learning, but one of the most important ones is to consider the state of the student. It is rare for students to enter a classroom in one of the many optimal readiness states for learning-curiosity, anticipation, feeling accepted, belonging, or even feeling challenged. Yet highly successful teachers evoke those states every day. Recent evidence reminds us of the critical (and often-overlooked) importance of fostering curiosity, anticipation, and challenge. Each of these states releases a powerful learning-readiness concoction inside the brain, which nearly guarantees that the brain wants to "drink up" the new learning. Indeed, brain network analyses of 65,700 subjects tell us that the positive emotions of joy and satisfaction can inhibit the occurrence of many negative emotions, such as boredom, frustration, distress, or anxiety.

Here's one quick way to get your students' brains ready for learning. Ask a question that invokes those three states of curiosity, anticipation, and challenge. One example to stimulate curiosity and challenge is, "What do you want to be remembered for when you are 30, and why?" Another way is to use countdowns for activities to create anticipation: "We'll start in ten, nine, eight …." Finally, use an energizer to ramp up blood flow and the brain's "hungry to learn" chemicals (dopamine, norepinephrine, and cortisol). These chemicals also help foster new and lasting connections. Find which tool works best for you and your students, but know that getting them ready for learning should always be your mandatory first step.

Construction

With ready brains in place, it is time to start the second phase: building new learning (construction). Here are four cognitive tools that can help students deepen and retain knowledge. One well-known (but under-used) tool is semantic shaping (the use of metaphors, stories, examples, and analogies). Young children have fewer existing mental pathways and algorithms that help them navigate life. We learn them as we age. But if you can tap into a developed pathway, you can help students understand new concepts. For example, you could say to the class, "In one way, going to war is like a huge chess game. In other ways, there are many differences; can you name three of them?" Metaphors like this use existing, known brain pathways (in this case, knowing how to play chess) as a bridge to new learning (understanding war).

The second tool is strategically chunk-sizing content. Chunk new content into smaller segments to avoid cognitive overload (overtaxing working memory), or enhance the relevance of the content with bigger chunks. When teachers alter the size of the content chunk, students' brains adapt to process the information differently. Younger students may need smaller content chunks (for example, they may need to learn just one different animal, vocabulary word, or problem a week). Older students might thrive on considering a big-picture, essential question such as, "Why did this country go to war to begin with?", which can open up interest in the economics, cultural, geographic, or social implications of war.

A third tool, multisensory instruction, can engage multiple sensory pathways-an effective approach because the brain blends mind, body, and emotions with no separation. Ask students to use their body to learn through movements and reproducing gestures, such as "gesturing out" a math problem, which can create clear connections and cement the memory. Evoke purposeful and strong emotions to enhance learning and memory.

Finally, you can use "filter-switching," which influences the brain's perceptual bias. Want to deepen students' learning about World War II? Study it through the filter of being Jewish, black, or Japanese. military nurse. This strategy works because it gives your students' brains a new personal reference, a fresh bias, and a new set of boundaries and connections that may have been missing from their own filter set. Each filter will enhance the memory making, with novel and deeper connections for learning.

Consolidation

The last stage of learning is consolidation, when the learning is "proofed" with error correction, meaning is made, and retrieval is practiced. The brain rarely encodes complex information perfectly the first time. Our brain is a gist processor; it needs "just enough" information to help you survive. It isn't designed for the detailed information overloads that are commonly experienced in schools. To improve the consolidation of newly learned, detailed learning, give students a brief break. At the secondary level, the time students have between classes can work as this brain break. At the primary level, switch subjects, let students take a walk within the classroom, or do reflective writing. The passage of time (hours or days after learning) gives the brain undistracted time to form memories. Students can also summarize the new learning at the end of a lesson, hang anchor charts of key content, and use retrieval practice. Finish off with the transfer of knowledge: "How does this apply to us?"

If you find you don't have time for these tools to help learning last, you'll need to allocate your teaching time differently. Each of these three steps (readiness, construction, and consolidation) is a non-negotiable stage for the brain's new learning.

Movement and Memory

We've discussed some cognitive tools needed to get the brain ready for new learning, but students also need physical activity and movement to improve their learning. Many educators still believe physical education (and of course, recess) takes time away from other subjects without offering a compensatory benefit. There's zero evidence to support that belief. A school without movement, self-care, socializing, and games is telling its students, "We don't care about you."

How Physical Activity Affects Learning

Physical activity enhances circulation: Individual neurons can get more oxygen and nutrients. Oxygen fuels mitochondria activity, and those cells fuel brain function.
Exercise releases dopamine in the brain: This improves students' mood, working memory, and effort.
Exercise regulates norepinephrine and heart rate: This is significant in terms of increasing blood flow to the brain, which fosters long-term memory and improves focus and attention.
Exercise triggers the release of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF): BDNF boosts neurons' ability to communicate with each other and accelerates the development of long-term potentiation (LTP), or memory formation.
Daily, physical activity for 20 minutes or more yields the massive benefits of neurogenesis: The production of brand-new neurons, which boosts mood regulation, cognitive function, and memory.

Physical activity enhances student attention, working memory, and short- and long-term memory. It can also influence classroom behaviors.

Student on-task behavior at this school was tracked prior to initiating a long-term physical activity program. After six weeks of regular physical activity, the likelihood of a classroom in the school reaching 80 percent of engaged participation with direct instruction was seven times greater than prior to the exercise program. After 12 weeks, the likelihood of on-task behavior had jumped to 28 times greater than before the exercise program.

Social-emotional learning programs emphasize self-regulation, and physical activity is also a highly effective self-regulation strategy. Both acute and chronic stress can be spurred by toxic environments, home-life challenges, trauma, poverty, anxiety, racism, social isolation, sexism, and many other factors. Schools are also facing a rise in teenage depression. Exercise is one of the most effective interventions for stress and depression.

A student who has regular exercise habits will make healthier choices when faced with stressful circumstances. In addition, their exercise routines can build stress resilience to help them better cope with future stressors.

So get students up and moving for energizers at least once every 20 minutes. Ensure students get daily physical exercise (recess or PE). That's the first step to boosting cognition, stress regulation, and attitude. Share with families the benefits of physical activity, so there's greater support at home. So many educators wonder why today's kids are different. Here's a starting point: We reduced exercise, theater, dance, and PE in most schools. It's time to get back on board.

Consider Emotions

In framing our whole child approach to the brain and learning, let's now turn to the underlying "climate" at school: Emotions. Emotions are the "rough draft" survival tools used by your brain to get a response from yourself or others. Students', teachers', and leaders' emotions are omnipresent-during 90 percent of your waking hours, you experience emotions. Yet healthy emotions seem to be less and less common in our schools. Layers of chronic stress (from social media, fewer intact families, immigration-status questions, discrimination, and other factors), as well as insufficient self-regulation skills, can inhibit emotional agility.

What helps foster a climate for learning and better behaviors? Paving the way for more joy and satisfaction in student learning. Joy comes from surprising, relevant events (for example, when a discouraged student succeeds on a test). Satisfaction comes when students feel connected to others, have control over their day, see progress in what they do, and have a sense of purpose or meaning.

Another critical emotion is empathy, known as the caring-connector emotion. To build your empathy for students, listen to them, match their body language, and stop talking. Allow your copycat mirror neurons to answer, "What would it be like to be in their shoes?" Try to discover some of their cultural history and personal narrative by developing a deeper understanding of their point of view. Empathy is critical to anti-bullying and school safety efforts.

Certain student emotions or states are correlated with bullying, vandalism, or even shootings. These include anger, holding grudges, and not connecting with others. Teach reconciliation, self-regulation, and empathy. When students act out, start with empathy within yourself. Then remember that many students don't (yet) have the toolbox of emotions they need. Model the responses students need to thrive in school and life.

Considerations and Potential Drawbacks

Neuroscience research shows that learning is not a one-dimensional process. Providing learning experiences that engage multiple areas of the brain allow students to engage in authentic learning where previous knowledge is activated and new information is integrated. Trauma and negativity affect the brain chemistry and, oftentimes, will block sensory pathways. We know our students do not always come from homes that are meeting all of their basic needs. Whole brain teaching starts with positivity, and when students are not engaged, the teacher assumes the responsibility of providing more time to practice rather than scolding.

Whole brain teaching is not a typical classroom. This approach is loud and animated. While this approach is awesome for students who have traumatic backgrounds, there are groups of students that would find this learning approach overwhelming. If you have a student that is shy, quiet, or has sensory processing issues, this may not be the strategy for them. However, research has shown that there are high rates of learning in African-American males and students with ADHD due to the multi-sensory approach, high energy, high engagement strategies that are used.

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