Best Practices at Tier 1 [Secondary]. Gayle Gregory
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attention to one’s thoughts and feelings. Students of all ages, from elementary to high school, can benefit from mindfulness training. By incorporating some short, easy-to-do mindfulness exercises into daily classroom routines, teachers can help students learn to be more aware of—and, thus, able to control—their thoughts and actions. Not only does mindfulness training help students manage their emotions, but it also can help improve their attention and develop their abilities of concentration, conflict resolution, and empathy for others—all of which offer huge payoffs for school and life. Practicing mindfulness can help build a calm atmosphere in the classroom and improve the overall classroom environment.
Teaching mindfulness doesn’t require complicated strategies. A very basic mindfulness strategy, for example, is simply teaching students to quiet themselves and take some deep breaths. Teachers also can encourage students to eliminate the distracting noise of external stimuli by taking a short walk or focusing on a short period of creative exploration, such as drawing using noise-canceling headphones, journal reflections, visualizations, meditation, or simply taking a short time-out to regroup thinking before moving to another learning exercise or activity. See also the Hawn Foundation (http://thehawnfoundation.org/mindup) for more on mindfulness and mindful awareness training.
In the 21st century, we are bombarded with stimuli that fight for our attention. Helping students learn to use the quiet, reflective time mindfulness affords can teach them to be more in the moment, rather than obsessing about past events or future worries. At the same time, mindfulness goes a long way to quiet student spirits and, in the process, increase their ability to focus their attention on the task at hand.
Providing Relevant, Meaningful, and Engaging Instruction
Learning new information can be a stressful experience for students and, therefore, needs special attention from educators as they attempt to build a brain-friendly classroom. The more relevant, meaningful, and engaging the learning experience, the more effective it will be for students in the classroom.
One way to make learning more engaging is to make it more accessible, something educators can accomplish by helping students anchor new ideas and understandings to familiar concepts. The brain connects new information to existing information by looking for similarities in patterns and schemas, a process Ratey (2008) refers to as chaining, and which pediatrician and author Mel Levine (1993) describes as horizontal threading. In other words, the brain can’t connect new information unless there is something with which to hook it. For this reason, preassessing is an important tool for educators to use before teaching a new topic. If students have little or no prior knowledge or skills associated with new topics, teachers need to know so they can provide the important backfill of information necessary to help students make connections and understand. By giving students advance organizers and pointing out connections, teachers can help develop the schemas and patterns necessary to help students feel less intimidated or overwhelmed by new learning. First introduced by David Ausubel in 1968, advance organizers, sometimes called a hook or anticipatory set, are tools teachers use to introduce the lesson’s content before starting a new topic. They also are helpful in gathering preassessment information. (See chapter 5, page 133, for examples of advance organizers.)
Educators also can help students find meaning in new material by engaging a number of their senses in the learning experience. Of the five acute senses—hearing, vision, touch, scent, and taste—educators often only engage the first two in the classroom. Vision is a great attention-getter and is far more powerful than hearing, as students often tune out the teacher’s voice (Sousa & Tomlinson, 2001). Nevertheless, most classroom teachers try to gain and keep their students’ attention through teacher talk. Richard Mayer (2010), a psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, indicates that students learn better from multisensory teaching than from learning that engages only one sensory modality.
Mayer is not alone in these findings. James Medina (2008), developmental molecular biologist and affiliate professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington School of Medicine, shows that memory is more accurate and retained longer when learning is multisensory. According to his studies, classrooms that provide sensory-enriched environments contribute to increased dendritic growth. When students engage in multiple rehearsals and practice using their brain’s visual, auditory, and kinesthetic pathways, they actually strengthen the connections between the brain’s dendritic cells and increase the efficiency of recall and use of information (Medina, 2008).
Learning also becomes more familiar and engaging when it has relevance. Students respond better to real-world situations, examples, and artifacts. Students don’t always find reading information in a textbook interesting and stimulating. Here are some other simple techniques to make learning more relevant for students.
In essence, the brain strives to make sense of the world and seeks to understand. The brain has a natural innate seeking system, an emotional system that causes us to be curious and explore to find what we need (Panksepp, 1998). Rita Smilkstein (2003) suggests that learning is an innate human need that drives us all to be curious and seek out information about our world. As we have seen, humans also respond to novelty, interest, and experiences, and these types of stimulation contribute to the growth of the brain’s dendrites (Diamond & Hopson, 1998). Dendrites are branch-like extensions in a brain cell that receive messages from the axon of another neuron. As students learn, dendrites connect to create a larger network. Multiple rehearsals and practice using visual, auditory, and kinesthetic pathways strengthen these connections and cause myelination—a thickening of the connections that increases the efficiency of recall and ease of use (Medina, 2008). By providing a strong foundation of a new concept or skill, we are creating new dendrites—or pathways—to higher levels of learning. Helping students see relevance, usefulness, and the real-world applications of what they are learning increases engagement and offers purpose for the brain—and, thus, is fundamental to creating a brain-friendly learning environment.
Giving Students More Ownership of Their Learning
As the examples we’ve explored in this chapter indicate, activity and participation, rather than just passive participation in the educational experience, encourage student learning. One powerful technique for actively engaging students in the learning experience is by giving them more ownership over it. The work of theorists John Dewey (1938), Jean Piaget (1997), and Lev Vygotsky (1978), fundamentally the fathers of student-focused learning, enlightens us on how children learn best. As they identify, student-centered responsibility is an approach to curriculum planning that takes into account students’ interests, learning preferences, and abilities. It is rooted in the constructive principles of learning whereby students take ownership and have choices about what, how, and why they are learning. This approach infuses the learning process with problem solving, creative thinking, and critical thinking as it develops students’ metacognitive skills.
Much research and writing have focused on the idea of giving students more responsibility over the content and pace of their learning. J. Scott Armstrong (2012) claims, “Traditional education ignores or suppresses learner responsibility” (p. 2). Self-determination theory also supports why this type of learning works (Deci & Ryan, 2002). This theory suggests that learning is always self-directed or self-determined. If students are allowed to control their learning, it becomes their reward.
Student-centered learning offers numerous benefits. It allows students to study what they are curious about and to achieve curriculum goals. It also enables students to use a variety of strategies to suit their learning preferences and satisfy their social