Brain rules classroom

Brain Rules
by
John Medina

These are simply my notes put onto
slides – very simple, very basic. This
is not an attempt at a polished
presentation.

Again, these are my notes, not
necessarily quotes from the book.

There is not enough time in my
life to polish this presentation and
apply the “Brain Rules” to it.

If my typoographical erors disturb
you, or it upsets you that I gave
up trying to find pictures slides, or
it bugs you that I was obviously
falling asleep during chapter 6
because there is only one note,
please put in your yoga DVD
instead of watching this slide
show...

…or better yet email me (
PBogush@wallingford.k12.ct.us) to let me
know what to fix or if you have any
suggestions for copyright free images to use.

All that said, I highly recommend
the book. Yes The World is Flat
might open your eyes to what our
future holds, but this book will
introduce to you how you should
be teaching your students to be
prepared for that future now.

“If you wanted to
create an education
environment that was
directly opposed to
what the brain was
good at doing, you
probably would
design something like
a classroom.”
p5

#1 Exercise

Exercise
Rule #1 Exercise
boosts brain power

When kids get to
aerobically
exercise during
school, their brains
work better.

Survival
Rule #2 The
human brain
evolved, too
Rule #2
Survival

If someone does not feel safe with
a teacher, they will not be able to
perform as well.p46
If a kid does not feel safe with a teacher,
they will not to perform as well.

If you have a
student that feels
misunderstood
because you
cannot connect
with the way the
they learn, the
student can
become isolated.

Wiring
Rule #3 Every
Brain is wired
differently

Smaller
classrooms
create better
learning
environments.

Given that each brain is wired
differently, being able to read your
students’ mind is a powerful tool.

Getting to know
each student
allows you to
know when
students are
confused or
engaged...

…or whether your
teaching is being
transformed into
learning.

Attention
Rule #4 We
don’t pay
attention to
boring things

If your kids are
paying attention,
they will learn more.

How long before your kids
lose interest never to
return?
10 minutes

Use messages
that grab their
attention and are
connected to
memory, interest,
and awareness.

Students use prior
experiences to
predict whether
they should pay
attention.

Use novel stimuli
– be unusual,
unpredictable, or
distinctive –to get
the kid’s
attention

Tap into the student’s
emotions to get their
attention.

Students will remember
emotionally arousing lessons.

Kids are terrific pattern matchers, constantly
assessing their environment for similarities,
and they tend to remember things if they think
they have seen them before.

Start lessons with
concepts and go to
details. Give them
meaning before
details.

Getting kids emotionally aroused
focuses attention on the “gist’ of an
experience at the expense of
peripheral details.

Students’ memories record the gist of
what they encounter, not by keeping a
literal record of the experience.

With the passage of time,
students retrieval of gist always
trumps their recall of details…

…which means their heads fill with
generalized pictures of concepts or
events, not with slowly fading minutiae.

Student’s memory is enhanced by
creating associations between
concepts.

Words presented in a logically
organized hierarchal structure are
much better remembered than words
placed randomly

If students can derive the meaning of
the words to one another, we can
much more easily recall the details.

Always give the kids the meaning
before the details.

What separates novices from
experts?

“Experts knowledge is not simply a list of
facts and formulas that are relevant to their
domain; instead their knowledge is organized
around core concepts or ‘big ideas’ that guide
their thinking about their domains.”

Research shows we cannot multitask—
we are biologically incapable of
processing attention-rich inputs
simultaneously.

Students who are interrupted take
50% longer to accomplish a task,
and makes 50% or more errors.

Giving your kids too much information
without enough time to digest it
sacrifices learning for expediency.

Break classes into 10 minute
segments. First minute the gist,
the next nine the details

Teacher should start with a where we
are going at the start, with where we
are throughout – stops students from
having to figure it out and multitask.

At the end of each ten minutes there
should be a hook, looking backwards,
or forward – and always triggering an
emotion.

Short Term Memory
Rule #5 Repeat to remember

Students forget 90% of what they learn
in class within 30 days. The majority of
this forgetting occurs within the first few
hours after class.

Memory worked best if the
environmental conditions at retrieval
mimicked the environmental conditions
at encoding.

Information is best remembered when it is
elaborate, meaningful, and contextual. The
quality of the encoding stage – those earliest
moments of learning – is one of the single
greatest predictors of later learning success.

When you are trying to drive a piece of
information into a kids memory system,
make sure they know what it means.

First moments of a class are
vitally important.

Memory of an event is stored in the
same places that were initially recruited
to perceive the learning event.

The more the brain structures involved
during the initial introduction to the
information, the easier it is to recall the
information.

Teach information and skills in the
same way, in the same environment,
and with the same tools in which they
will be tested.

Your chances of remembering
something increase if you reproduce
the environment in which you first put it
into your brain.

Long Term Memory
Rule #6 Remember to Repeat

Memory may not be fixed at the
moment of learning, but repetition,
doled out in specifically time intervals,
is fixative.

Thinking or talking about a lesson
immediately after it has occurred
enhances memory for that event.

Memory loss in the first hour or
two after a class can be lessened
by deliberate repetition.

The probability of confusion is increased
when content is delivered in unstoppable,
unrepeated waves, poured into students as if
they were wooded forms.

Better to space out repetitions
than to do them all at once.

Deliberately re-expose yourself to
information more elaborately if you
want the retrieval to be of higher
quality.

Deliberately re-expose yourself to
information more elaborately and in
fixed spaced intervals if you want the
retrieval to be the most vivid it can be.

Learning occurs best when new
information is incorporated gradually
into the memory store rather than
when it is jammed in all at once.

The brains excitement when
introduced to something new will
last only an hour or two.

If it is not re-energized with 90 minutes
the excitement will vanish and will re-
set to zero ready to accept the next
signal that might come its way.

How do you get it to stay permanent?
The information must be repeated after
a period of time has passed.

It could take years for your brain
to put something into its long-term
storage.

Forgetting allows us to prioritize
events.

We assign them the same priority as
events critical to our survival. If we
deem them as unimportant, we forget
them.

If students forget something, it was
because the weren’t presented in a
way to show the students that it was
important in their life.

Sleep loss means mind loss. Sleep
loss cripples thinking, in just about
everyway you can measure thinking.

Sleep loss hurts attention, executive function,
immediate memory, working memory, mood,
quantitative skills, logical reasoning ability,
and general math knowledge.

Eventually, sleep loss affects fine
and gross motor control
movements.

Sleep is intimately involved in
learning.

Sleep hormones are at their maximum
levels in the teenage brain making
them want to sleep more in the
morning.

Stress
Rule #8 Stressed brains don’t
learn the same way

After being shut down again and
again there is a learned
helplessness.

Certain types of stress hurt
learning, some types boost
learning.

Bad stress = cause of stress is
out of student’s control

Our stress response systems
were shaped to solve problems
that lasted for seconds, not years.

How long does the stress of a
school day last? Mom and dad
divorcing? A Bully?

Prolonged stress effects memory, math
skills, concentration, problem solving,
and almost any other type of cognitive
skills that can be tested.

One of the greatest predictors of
performance in school is the
emotional stability of the home.

The ability of the student to do
well in your class might have
nothing to do with your teaching.

In a knowledge based economy where
problem solving and creativity is key,
stress is a major issue that must be
dealt with.

Sensory Integration
Rule #9 Stimulate more of the senses

Groups in multisensory environments
always do better than groups in
unisensory environments. They have
more accurate recall…

The following is Richard Mayer’s
rules for multimedia
presentations:

1) Multimedia principle: Students
learn better from words and
pictures than words alone

2) Temporal Contiguity Principle:
Students learn better when
corresponding words and pictures
are presented simultaneously
rather than successively.

3) Spatial contiguity principle: Students
learn better when corresponding words
and pictures are presented near to
each other rather than far from each
other on the page or screen

4) Coherence principle: Students
learn better when extraneous
material is excluded.

5) Modality principal: Students learn
better from animation and narration
than from animation and on-screen text

Smell-exposed groups can
retrieve twice as many memories
as the controls.

Most critical time to use multisensory
approach in classroom is during an
introduction.

The right smell in a store can
double sales. Can the right smell
in a classroom “double” learning?

Vision
Rule #10 Vision trumps all other senses

Vision is probably the best single
tool we have for learning anything.

People will remember 10% of
information presented orally
tested 72 hours after exposure…

…add an image and it goes up to
65%.

One of the reasons that words are less
efficient than images is because the
brain sees words as lots of tiny
pictures.

Reading creates a bottleneck ---
text chokes the brain.

To our cortex, there is no such
thing as words.

Simple, two dimensional pictures are
quite adequate. If a picture is too
complex it could take away from the
transfer of information.

Gender
Rule #11 Male and Female
Brains are different

Girls are better at verbal memory
tasks, verbal fluency tasks, and
speed of articulation.

When girl friends communicate with
each other, they lean in, maintain eye
contact, and do a lot of talking.

Girls use sophisticated verbal
talents to cement relationships.

Boys cement relationships by
hitting one another ; )

Girls say “Let’s do this.”

Males and females process
emotions differently.

Females perceive their emotional
landscape with more data points –
detail – and see it in greater resolution,
women have more information to which
they can react.

Exploration
Rule #12 We are powerful and
natural explorers

Exploration creates the need for
more discovery so that more joy
can be experienced.

How to get more exploring into
schools?

1) Consistent exposure to the real
world.

2) Consistent exposure to those
that operate in the real world.

3) Consistent exposure to real
research.

“The greatest Brain Rule of all is
something I cannot prove or
characterize…it is the importance
of curiosity.”

Again, I know this presentation did not follow
the “Brain Rules.” I simply ran out of time.
But if you have any suggestions for images or
other ideas I would be happy to use them!
PBogush@wallingford.k12.ct.us

Brain rules classroom

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