Super Teaching

Over 1000 Practical Strategies

Eric P. Jensen

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781452294742
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

Empower students with proven strategies for brain-friendly instruction!

This revised fourth edition offers more than 1,000 brain research–based teaching strategies along with reflections, affirmations, sidebars, bulleted lists, quotable quotes, and a wealth of instructional tools. The author shows how to improve instructional effectiveness, plan standards-based lessons, and optimize student learning with practical techniques such as:

• Matching instruction with learners' developmental stages
• Responding to unique learning styles with differentiated techniques
• Using assessment as part of instruction
• Addressing the learning needs of students in poverty
• Managing students' emotions with music and energizers
• Practicing positive teaching mind-sets to enhance student results

This book is not about the problems facing today’s educators. It is about the vision and possibility that can be brought forth to make education work. The problems we face as educators are, to a large degree, merely symptoms. It’s time to stand back, take a deep breath, and rethink what it means to be a teacher.

Eric Jensen

 

1

How Teaching Changes Lives

 

Chapter Preview

• A Teacher’s Influence on Emotions and Memories
  • The Residual Effect of Memories
  • The Importance of Change on the Brain

 

A TEACHER’S INFLUENCE ON EMOTIONS AND MEMORIES

We’ve all heard of stories about a teacher who changed a student’s life. These stories remind us of the power of successful teaching. In middle school, most of my own teachers were not exceptional—either good or bad. There was one who did not see eye to eye with me (or vice versa). And then there were Mr. Robinson and Miss Krisch. Both were English teachers, and both seemed to be supportive of me. They made friendly, constructive notes on my homework, and they shared personal stories in class. I couldn’t say that their teaching style was dramatic. But I could say that they were caring, adult role models to me when I really needed them. When I finished schooling I became a middle school English teacher. I also found out that, years later, Mr. Robinson and Miss Krisch found each other and were married. Role models are a powerful force.

Students rarely say that what made a significant difference in their lives was the content they learned. It’s true that the content may help students better prepare for the next grade level. It’s true that the depth of background knowledge, the skills, or the schemas learned may propel them academically to their next grade. And it’s also true that the better you teach them, the less likely they are to drop out or fail to graduate. But there’s much more to the process of changing lives.

What is it for most students? What turns a student’s life around? What turns you from a carrier of content to a superior teacher who transforms lives? In my case, it was the relationship and the caring that helped me enjoy English and learn from role models. The broader answer is that it’s not easy to quantify, but there are clues.

If a colleague befriends you, you’re likely to remember him or her. The emotional memory sticks around. If, during childhood, a student felt embarrassed or humiliated by a teacher in front of the class, the incident might have left an emotional scar. This may lead to one of two school-age decisions: “I’ll make sure this never happens in a class I teach” or “I now think less of teachers and would never become one.” Once the emotional memories—good or bad—occur, they tend to influence related decisions in the future. In your teaching, what students will remember most are the emotions. Emotions influence our beliefs, decisions, and, ultimately, our actions. In short, changes in the brain can lead to changes in behavior.

The Residual Effect of Memories

I have asked a room full of teachers if they ever had a negative experience in school. I describe various scary, sad, horrifying, or mean experiences students have, the memory of which stays with them for years. These include feelings of being embarrassed or humiliated in front of their peers and countless other tactless acts. How many hands would go up among teachers (a group self-selected because they have “made it” through the system) if asked whether they have had those experiences one or more times? The answer is, consistently, the majority of hands. School experiences change us! School changes kids’ brains, either for better or for worse.

The key experience that changes a student for the worse is the emotional wake left by a teacher. The wake has a residual effect. The power of emotional memories starts at the instant something happens and spirals into the future, influencing the decision-making process.

The Importance of Change on the Brain

Everyday experiences change the brain—reading a book, learning to play the piano, hearing an inspirational lecture, and countless other experiences. The amazing thing is that while it’s happening, we are usually either enjoying the moment or disliking it, but certainly not aware of our brain being changed. The brain changes in order to survive on this planet. If we don’t change, our environment would have to stay exactly the same for us to stick around. The more dynamic the environmental changes, more dynamic we must be—or we don’t survive.

Some events change behaviors, others change personality, but always the brain is changed. You cannot get any change, of any type, that does not include a biological basis. The brain is involved in everything we do, from sleeping to surfing and from teething to teaching. Examples of types of changes in the brain include the following:

• size of brain cells
• quantity of connections between brain cells
• type of brain chemicals present
• amount of neural firing (cellular activation)
• quantity and survivability of new brain cells
• distribution of brain activity
• amount of brain mass in any particular area

In other words, when we change our minds or we change our behaviors, our brains become physically different. The relevance of this is profound: as a teacher, you change the brains of your students on a structural or anatomical basis every day. Below, you can see that for every year in the classroom, the actual structure of the extensions on the neurons grow in length.

Now for the bottom line: what do you do that causes the change? Here are some examples:

 

• relevant classroom activities
• meaningful, supportive relationships
• consistent skill building
• strengthening character values
• exercise and physical activity
• critical access to valued resources
• complex, coherent, novel learning
• stress-management tools

SUMMARY

We change when our brains are stimulated to learn new things, complex things, challenging things. We change our brains when we learn new skills, such as reading, math, or interpersonal skills. We change when we move from being a novice to being an expert at anything. Change also occurs when we develop new emotional memories. These memories drive new behaviors.

Reflection

• What are your feelings about the topics presented in this chapter?
• What are some practical applications for what you’re learning?
• What do you want to remember from this chapter?

No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it. We must learn to see the world anew.

Albert Einstein

2

How Students Learn

Chapter Preview

• The Brain During the Learning Process
  • Neural History
  • Learning Environment
  • Content Acquisition
  • Elaboration of the Learning
  • Encoding of the Information

Over the years, you’ve heard the word learning countless times. But what actually happens when learning occurs? How does that process play out in a classroom? What does it mean to say that your students learn well or learn quickly? This chapter summarizes and illuminates key ways of thinking about how your students learn.

THE BRAIN DURING THE LEARNING PROCESS

New learning forms new synaptic connections. Each cell body, or neuron, has spindly branches called dendrites and a single longer projection called an axon. The axon of one cell connects with the dendrites of another. Novel and coherent experiences form those connections. If the experiences are familiar, the existing connections may simply be strengthened. If the experiences are incoherent, no learning may result. In a student’s brain, the acquisition stage is the making of connections; neurons are now “talking” to one another. The relevance of this is that learning takes time because learning physically changes the brain.

The sources for acquisition are endless. They may include discussions, lectures, visual tools, environmental stimuli, hands-on experiences, role models, reading, manipulatives, videos, reflection, projects, and pair-share activities. There is no single best way for students to learn something, but the age-old rule of “students who do the talking and doing, do the learning” still applies. And the actual trial-and-error processing of the learning must happen quickly or the brain may encode erroneous information. Remember, avoid letting your students go home with misunderstandings; make sure they encode the correct meanings.

In the past two decades new knowledge has been fueled by a revolution in cognitive neuroscience. These discoveries are redefining the very possibilities of education itself. Let’s explore several critical variables in the brain’s learning process:

• neural history (student’s brain background)
• learning environment (e.g., where, when, who, the stakes at play, how the learner feels)
• content acquisition (input, how the learning happens)
• elaboration of the learning (how the data are tweaked into meaningful information)
• encoding of the information (how the learning is either saved or relinquished)

Neural History

To find out where neuroscience and the classroom link up, let’s explore those areas in sequence. Every student in your class comes to school with a brain customized by life experience. Students’ life experiences have a huge effect on their learning. Their neural history is not just the grades and test scores. A seemingly trivial accident, such as a bump on the head at a summer camp, could create a brain insult in the anterior ventral temporal lobe, an area responsible for certain types of semantic memory. This means that although a student’s memory may be good for common names and places, it’s poor for proper names and places. This type of memory functioning is common, yet it puzzles teachers who often think that a student is simply not trying hard enough. After all, if students can learn and recall some types of words, why can’t they do that with all of them? The brain’s unique history is the answer. Teachers will find more and more problems as kids who don’t wear helmets (think skateboarders and soccer players) come of school age and test-taking age. Using the brain as a batting ram during a game of soccer isn’t the best decision.

Does the brain have a chance to rehabilitate itself, then? Improvement happens with optimized conditions. How much improvement depends on the severity of the initial brain trauma; the child’s health, nutrition, exercise; and a host of other variables, including any attempts at skill building. But there are compensatory strategies that can be used, such as memory devices, study buddies, and over learning (redundant practicing).

Does this mean that a child’s damaged brain or lower-than-normal IQ limits his or her learning? Are the student’s genes the limiting factor? The answer is yes and no. First, IQ is strongly predictive of a child’s academic success. But actually, effort (sheer hard work or grit) is an even greater determiner of student success than IQ (Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, & Kelly, 2007; Duckworth & Seligman, 2005). This suggests that regardless of students’ brainpower (or lack thereof), you have a chance to succeed with them. Why? DNA is not fixed; we now know it can be influenced by environmental factors. The outdated paradigm was that our genes are the blueprints that only make copies, called ribonucleic acid (RNA, which is a “messenger and translator” molecule), that are involved in cell replication. Those copies activate tr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Changes in the Fourth Edition
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• 1. How Teaching Changes Lives
• 2. How Students Learn
• 3. Learning Environment
• 4. Lesson Planning With the Standards
• 5. Learner Differences
• 6. Assessment for Learning
• 7. Super Mind-Sets
• 8. They All Have Special Needs
• 9. Poverty’s Influence on Kids
• 10. Critical Connections
• 11. Learning to Remember
• 12. Listening Secrets
• 13. Engagement and Motivation Strategies
• 14. Fine-Tuning Your Presentation
• 15. The Productive Nature of Using Rituals
• 16. Managing Students’ Emotional States With Music and Energizers
• 17. Running Your Class Successfully
• 18. Ways to Create a Thriving Self
• References
• Index