Questions for each chapter
Please answer these questions for EACH chapter (based on the number of chapters depending on your grade level book):
1. Based on the information in this chapter, what should we doing differently in our classrooms and schools? In what ways might your suggest we start making the changes needed if we are to meet the needs of all students?
2. In what ways might your translate the principles presented in the chapter into practical, everyday useful methods?
3. If you were to plan your next steps for making your curriculum more brain compatible what would I be seeing you do differently in your classes?
Question One: Chapter 2 suggests that altering the physical environment in the classroom can reduce stress level and reduce perceived danger. As educators, we need to create body compatible and healthy classrooms and schools. Things such as poor lighting, noise/acoustics, and air quality can negatively impact learning in the classroom. For example, fluorescent lighting was linked to headaches, seizures, attention disorders, and hyperactivity. Appropriate airflow and a constant temperature of 68 to 72 degrees has been shown to enhance students learning. It is important to create a harmonious environment that promotes health, relaxation, an positive feelings by providing things such positive awareness of self and others, enhancing connections with nature and people, opportunities for privacy, reduce threats of physical harm, meaningful and different stimulus, time to relax, balance of consistency and flexibility, and aesthetics. Create a positive awareness of self and others by setting up the classroom to reflect qualities you like and encourage. Include evidence of likes, hopes, dreams, and potential. Privacy is important, especially in students who have strong intrapersonal skills, to have a spot to think and problem solve. Students needs an area they can call their own. Giving students an area to reflect is also important as it develops metacognition, which creates new connections in the brain and helps us process new information. The more students are able to self-calm, the more the brain adapts and creates new connections and increases positive thinking. It is also important to make sure to find an appropriate balance of constancy and flexibility for our body’s to feel comforatable.
ReplyDeleteQuestion 2: To practically address lighting issues in the classroom you can, remove curtains/coverings to let daylight in, turn of one row of fluorescents and add a few lamps, turn off lights when using technology or during a read aloud, place students who are affected by lighting appropriately, use yellow or pink overlays on pages with high contrast, allow students to wear visors as needed to shield their eyes, and if possible replace fluorescents with full-spectrum bulbs. We can also add some natural noises to mask other noises running in the classroom such as fans and lights flickering. Adding a wind chime outside can help or opening the windows to hear birds chirping outside works as well. Try a nature CD with water or forest sounds. Also, water is a very soothing sound, so adding a small fountain in the classroom can be helpful. There are many different things you can do to build positive awareness of ourselves and others including displaying the students work with a personal best area or team bulletin boards where they choose what to display, displaying personal posters such as a student of the week activity, hang mirrors, have students share objects form their home, and display things that reflect who you are as well. To enhance our connections with nature and people you can: bring in plants, create a nature area in the classroom and bring in different things to display, create a small garden or a life lab outside the classroom, bring in people from the community like career days, visit places in the community, have students bring in objects from their cultures, and consider having students share traditions around holiday times. Ways to create privacy include: having baskets, bins or cubbies for students to put their things, having a area for students to quiet down or reflect (such as a take-five zone), provide forts or places only a few students can get into at a time, and give opportunities to walk around. Vary the stimuli by doing activities outside of the classroom and bring in new objects and tools for the students to use. Encourage time to relax by using the take-five zone, provide times to have fun such as play and parties, provide mad-libs, or anti-coloring books, or participate in silent reading. Also, it is important to provide a balance of constancy and flexibility by: providing calendars, where to go for missed homework, steps for completing homework, and shifting the classroom perspective occasionally, and using classroom theme/color.
ReplyDeleteQuestion 3: After reading this chapter, I think I would really be trying to work on the lighting in my room by turning of my fluorescent lights and letting the daylight in and using a lamp, bringing in plants and objects to make my room feel like home, and displaying more of the kids things in my speech room.
1. Right on the heals of my Chapter 1 comments, Chapter 2 focuses on the environment in the room. As I read the chapter, I really began to realize the school environments are taken for granted in most communities. I live in a fairly wealthy suburban county and area (it is known as the Lake Country) so all of our schools need to be kept up with great environments because of the competition created in Open Enrollment. However, the differences when I go to either very rural schools or very urban schools are astounding! If you get a chance, The Flat World of Education by Linda Darling-Hammond truly highlights the inequities in education, and according to the Brain research, it is not good. However, let’s look at what happens in some cases with our special education population or our most at-risk students and their environments. They are often put in very little rooms with little lighting. In some cases it is in the dungeon! So why would we put our most at-risk educationally challenged kids, in an environment that is physically designed not to give them the chance to do their best? As educators, we really need to make sure that all students in this country are given an equitable chance at succeeding. A students education shouldn’t be a lottery in where they live!
ReplyDelete2. I think teachers need to take a look specifically what I have control over in my environment. I think teachers do have control over much of the environment in which they teach. Or at least they can get more control! Some things they can’t would be temperature, holes in the walls, etc..., However, they do control what is hung in the classroom, the physical layout, and other things that make the classroom a more brain friendly classroom.
3. My classroom is in the original single room school house. It is very old compared to the other classrooms and areas of my school. It is very unique, but the students get a very different feel in my class. I do my best to display their work, but will make it a priority. Also, I am going to do something different at the beginning of the year and have them make do a personal collage to highlight their family and the things they like to do (In Spanish of course!). I am going to try to “Green” things up as well and see if I can’t get more plants and nature brought in.
I agree with you about putting our spec. ed. students in the worst possible environments ever! As a speech pathologist, I know how it is to be under a stair doing therapy or in a tiny room with no windows or even a control for the temperature. How are my kids supposed to learn in conditions like that!
ReplyDelete1)
ReplyDeleteThis chapter reminds teachers to vary instruction and avoid ruts. This chapter should also signal teachers to decrease the time between an assessment and feedback. This means NO more collecting homework! Homework needs to be assigned and gone over the next day allowing students to see what they did right and wrong.
2) & 3)
I have done a lot of work with brain based classrooms, so I no longer colect homework and because at times I feel as though I still have a teenage brain, I have always relied on Novelty to get through lessons. The big thing I have learned over time is the need for detailed and timely feedback, which made me stop collecting homework and going over it as a class.
Chapter 2 of "Secrects of the Teenage Brain"
ReplyDeleteWhen trying to change something with in one's classroom or the entire school, it is important to only do one or two things at a time. Chapter two had many good teaching suggestions. Two that I would like to use in my classroom are the use of movement and the use of higher level thinking questions. I have always used some physical movement in my class because I am a visualand kinestetic person. I would like students to create more movements for memorizing or when problem solving. It makes the time go by quicker and keeps the adrenaline pumping.On simple thing I can do is "high five" kids when they entire class or I see them in the hall. The can also help students "feel good" that some one is regonizing them.
Another areaa of emphasis is on asking or having students perform projects using high level thinkin. Bloom's taxonomy is a good place to start. Our high school has easier read flip charts that we can use when creating multiple choice questions. Unfortunately, students are still required to take multiple choice tests for a variety of reasons. I feel we do need to help them prepare for these.
Physcial movement may also help in the area of algebraic reasoning. I hear a lot that students are not coming into high school with the proper algebraic skills. Maybe manipulating objects could help with this.
When I have used "project based learning" in my class, students have seemed to enjoy it and it was invigorating for me to watch them work. A step in curriculum development may be to have departments create one project based learning unit with in a common course. start out small and see what happens. There may be teachers that enjoy creating the projects.