Chapter 5: The Brain on Whole Brain Teaching

Thinking about your own teaching tendencies, which brain areas are you most likely, and least likely, to activate in your students?

In the last year of teaching “WBT Style” I feel I have made so many adjustments to how I teach. In turn, this helped my students be able to learn to high standards by activating all parts of their brain. We tested, tried, failed, and practiced so many strategies. I definitely have my favorites!

The area of the brain I most likely use is the visual cortex. I am a visual learner, thus I need the visuals to teach. In this world of technology, my classroom was furnished with a 2-1 ratio of students to computers. Next year I will have a 1-1 iPad classroom. This assists the learners in visual cortex processing since they are looking at and constructing understanding. They do this through analyzing text and images, as well as creating their own visual representations of their understanding using computer programs and the Internet.

In an eMINTS (computer based) classroom, the standard of learning isn’t to play games; it is to create, construct, and use reasoning to complete PBL (project based learning). This utilizes the prefrontal cortex, which controls reasoning, planning and decision-making. This model of teaching may be hard for those students who like to ‘jump right in’ but it is a necessary skill in life!

Finding an area I use the least is difficult. I have attempted this year to utilize many of the strategies of WBT that I remember utilizing strategies from each part of the brain. The area that I teach the least (yet still a lot of use) would be the motor cortex. I taught the Crazy Professor Game and many students used this while we would read in class, but the majority of the students didn’t utilize this unless asked. It was difficult for the students to read a book and hold the pages while going through the motions of what they were reading. Some of my  ‘cool’ students didn’t want to do this because it wasn’t ‘cool’. They would use this as expected in class but it wasn’t their choice on their own time.