What is the brain?
• Brain is center of learning.
• Weighs about 3 pounds.
• It is a complex organ that allows us to think, move, feel, see, hear, taste, and smell.
• It controls our body, receives information, analyzes information, and stores information.
• It is always active.
• When it takes information through the senses, it translates it into a response.
... is unique.
... takes in the same information and then processes that information randomly.
... constructs information that it takes in from its environment so it makes sense to the brain.
Three Main Parts
• Brain Stem
– Cognitive brain (learning and thinking takes place.)
– Emotional brain (memory is stored and from which our emotional responses come.)
• Love, anger, fear...
– Brain Stem:
– “Housekeeping” function (keeps heart beating, tells body to breathe, controls voice.)
• A learning theory that is based on the structure and function of the brain.
• It is also defined as “any teaching technique or strategy that utilizes information about the human brain to organize how lessons are constructed and facilitated with emphasis placed on how the brain learns naturally.” (Slavkin, 2004).
• It offers a framework to enhance student learning.
Teachers have been encouraged to combine knowledge about their profession with findings from brain research to create learning environments
Mind/Brain Learning Principles
• Principle One: Brain is a complex adaptive system.
– Most powerful feature of the brain is the capacity for it to function on many levels and in many ways.
– Education MUST come to terms with the complex, multifaceted nature of the human learner.
• Principle Two: Brain is a social brain.
– Throughout our lives, our brain/minds change in response to their engagement with others.
– Part of our identity depends on establishing community and finding ways to belong.
– Learning is profoundly influenced by the nature of the social relationships within which people find themselves.
• Principle Three: The search for meaning is innate.
– Meaning to make sense of our experiences.
– The search for meaning ranges from the need to eat and find safety, through the development of relationships and a sense of identity, to an exploration of our potential and the quest for transcendence.
• Principle Four: The search for meaning occurs through “patterning”.
– It is included the schematic maps and categories, both acquired and innate.
– The brain/mind attempts to determine and understand patterns as they occur and giving expressions to unique and creative patterns of its own.
– Effective education must give learners an opportunity to formulate their own patters of understanding.
• Principle Five: Emotions are critical to patterning.
– What we learn is influenced and organized by emotions and mindsets involving expectancy, prejudice, self-esteem and the need for social interaction.
– Emotions and thoughts literally shape each other and cannot be separated.
• Principle Six: Every brain simultaneously perceives and creates parts and wholes.
– Both left and right hemispheres interact in every activity.
– Teaching needs to begin with an experience for students that provides exposure to the overall nature of the subject.
• Principle Seven: Learning involves both focused attention and peripheral perception.
– Before human beings can learn or make effective decisions, they must pay attention.
– Attention is a natural phenomenon guided by interest, novelty, emotion, and meaning.
• Principle Eight: Learning always involves conscious and unconscious processes.
– Educators must organize what they do so as to facilitate that subsequent unconscious processing or experience by students.
– Teaching largely becomes a matter of helping learners make visible what is invisible.
• Principle Nine: There are at least two ways of organizing memory.
1. Store isolated facts, skills, and procedures.
2. Simultaneously engage multiple systems in order to make sense of experience.
– Memory is what makes any type of performance possible, so memory is indispensable for survival and success.
– It is through a combination of both approaches to memory that meaningful learning occurs.
• Principle Ten: Learning is developmental
– All learning builds on previous learning and this process is accompanied by changes in the physiology and brain which are altered by experience.
– There is no limit to growth and to the capacities of humans to learn more.
• Principle Eleven: Complex learning is enhanced by challenge and inhibited by threat.
– The brain/mind “downshifts” under perceived threat. It then becomes less flexible, and goes back to primitive attitudes and procedures.
– We must create and maintain an atmosphere of relaxed alertness= the ideal mental state for higher order functioning.
– The genuine learning involves changes that lead to a reorganization of the self.
• Principle Twelve: Every brain in uniquely organized.
– We all have the same set of systems, and yet are all different.
– The differences express themselves in terms of learning styles, differing talents, and intelligences.
How Brain-Based Learning Impacts Education?
– Teachers must design learning around students interests and make learning contextual.
– Let students learn in teams and use peripheral learning.
– Encourage students to also learn in settings outside the classroom.
– Their assessment should allow them to understand their own learning styles and preferences.
– Students monitor and enhance their own learning process.
Three instructional techniques associated with brain-based learning
• Orchestrated immersion:
– Creating learning environments that fully immerse students in an educational experience.
• Relaxed alertness:
– Trying to eliminate fear in learners, while maintaining a highly challenged environment.
– Active processing:
– Allowing the learner to consolidate and internalize by actively processing it.
How can a teacher facilitate brain-based learning?
• The teacher will need to change classroom management styles.
• In the brain-based learning classroom, the students need to make their own learning decisions.
– By offering an assortment of learning activities for homework.
What kind of assessment should be used in brain-based learning?
• Assessments need to change as the classroom changes.
• The teacher should allow freedom to students in presenting the material they learn because it helps them make necessary connections to real life.