Educators faced with the challenge of being content experts have tremendous potential to create rich learning opportunities by designing instruction with students' brains in mind. New research on neuroscience and its educational applications provides teachers with valuable information on how to make learning both possible and probable (Willis, 2007). So, what can teachers do to create brain-friendly classrooms? Read on!
Make Multiple Viewing Options Standard
Prevailing wisdom used to be that windows of learning were relegated to early childhood. New research, however, suggests that learning is much more of a lifelong process. According to Willis, "We now know that through neuroplasticity, interneuron connections (dendrites, synapses, and myelin coating) continue to be pruned or constructed in response to learning and experiences throughout our lives" (2013). To feed these constantly evolving neural pathways, teachers can provide students multiple opportunities to learn content and skills (Willis, 2007). Spiraling curriculum is one way to achieve this. In this approach to curriculum design, students experience repeated exposures to content at increasing levels of complexity and often by engaging multiple intelligences, thus allowing them to explore a topic through a variety of lenses.
Add Time for Reflection
New research also supports the practice of providing students with time to think back on content presented earlier in the day. Schlichting and Preston (2014) report that students who reflected on what they had learned scored higher on classroom tests. Like multiple exposures to content, revisiting content through reflection provides the opportunity for increased synaptic transmission along the neural pathways involved in this particular learning. As knowledge is consolidated in the brain, these increased transmissions make learning more likely to stick. For teachers wanting to capitalize on how the brain works, this means building in time for students to forge connections with the content through reflective journaling, drawing pictures, completing exit slips, writing notes to themselves or their parents, or engaging in a quick think-pair-share conversation with a classmate.
Apply Varied Teaching Methods
Allowing students to experience content and demonstrate mastery through multiple modalities also strengthens neurological connections to learning. Grushka, Donnelly, and Clement (2014) explain that the more meaningful connections a student has to a particular piece of information, the more readily retrievable and usable that knowledge becomes. New information is encoded in short-term memory, but multiple activations help that memory become part of the student's working knowledge. For maximum retention, these activations should occur in a wide variety of prompts and contexts (Willis, 2013). Teachers can engage students by designing thematic units of study that present and assess content in multiple ways, integrating the arts, prompting kinesthetic and visual cues with graphic organizers, or heightening emotional relevance by allowing student collaboration and choice.
Integrate Music
Music offers one of the most powerful teaching methods for helping students build neural pathways and strengthen connections to new learning (Prigge, 2002). It's also one of the easiest strategies to apply. For example, one of us experienced the benefits of integrating music in her 8th grade U.S. history class. Noticing that students struggled to recall the details and significance of historical events, she developed one unit of study that included music and then compared assessment results to a similar unit conducted without music. In the music-integrated unit, she played current pop songs while students completed formative assessments. When it came time for summative assessments, some students hummed the songs they had listened to during instruction, and many reported that the music helped them recall the content. One student commented that by singing the songs, she remembered the information because she had created visual images to accompany them. Pairing content with music helped students master the material at a higher rate than students whose coursework did not include the musical component.
Educators can capitalize on neuroplasticity by allowing students to view content several times, providing multiple points of access to content, and integrating music into their curriculum. As advances in cognitive science reveal more about how the brain works, leveraging new research on human learning to create brain-friendly classrooms becomes both a responsibility and an opportunity.