LEARNING based on BRAIN RESEARCH

How do teachers create an inclusive architecture for learning?

Brain Based Teaching, that is curriculum founded upon brain research seems like a no-brainer.  It has never been codified, but educators have always been in the brain business.  We engage not 36 students but 36 unique and diverse neural landscapes that have divergent ways of learning. 

Memorizing the multiplication tables is essential making it logical to conclude that memorization is the best way to learn everything else.  This is a major reason that 40-60% of kids starting in kindergarten “fail to graduate” from high school.  Actually, their failure to graduate is an institutional failure to understand brain science: that kids, beyond rote learning have other learning styles that schools have failed to accommodate. 

“Rote learning is of limited usefulness in the universe of education”. --tnm

If we don't know about the human brain and learning, we are like someone sitting in the pilots seat of a 747 who has never ever flown a plane.  

Every teacher, administrator and educational policy maker should get a degree in the science of the brain and learning, or at least take a few courses.

That degree in the Brain and Learning might start out like this.

The Brain and Learning 101

Maximize the positive learning atmosphere of the classroom environment through trust building activities and teachable moments.  See more at: coming soon.

The human brain is a novelty engine, it is designed to seek out novelty in the environment for survival. It is designed to be intolerant of repetition. It is designed to turn off repetition. Here's an example.  Two of your students get a job at a Crispy Kreme shop and arrive at work for the first day on the job.  They are instantly immersed in the sensory sensation: the smell of freshly fried donuts.  With every breath they inhale, the brain receives neural impulses from the nose: great donuts!

But after 30 minutes, they no longer smell donuts.  Well, their brains are still getting the signals, but because they are not important for survival, the brain tunes them out.  The human brain abhors repetition.

So what does the brain need for learning to take place?

Historically, teachers have worked predominantly in the cognitive domain teaching science, history, literature and mathematics for example. The kids who succeed (about 40-60%) are Cognitive Learning dominant. But this only represents one of four learning modalities:

The Four Primary Learning Domains:
COGNITIVE, AFFECTIVE, INTUITIVE/NARRITIVE, 

KINESTHETIC SENSORY MOTOR

Learners, also vary in another perhaps more important way, chronospherically, how they navigate time: chronemics.

Here is an example of how time influences what we see and what we learn.

Click HERE music option 1.

Option 2 Vangelis

Students on the other hand burst into traditional classrooms with a diversity of neural learning styles.  Schools that recognize this and design for inclusion increase the number of students who successfully reach graduation.

1. Integrate learning beyond the cognitive learning domain by creating lessons that are also affective, intuitive and kinesthetic.

The kinesthetic physiology of neural transmission: An Example of Integrative Curriculum by Toby Manzanares.