Brain: Psychology and Students Essay

Submitted By saragimse
Words: 2489
Pages: 10

This book on Brain Matters, has given me a variety of instructional strategies I can use throughout my current teaching. For brain compatible instruction, I will be using real-life examples for my students to work with and provide them with hands on activities to enhance their learning. I will also be activating prior knowledge with my students and providing multiple ways for my students to revisit information they have learned. There are many ways I can make my classroom more brain compatible through allowing more down time, having reflection, service learning. One strategy I am going to add is applying more real-life examples to my students. Also providing more hands-on activities in which they are all involved. The more modalities involved in learning the more likely the information is to be understood, retained, and used in the world outside of school. An example I could do in my class is when we talk about Nutrition. I could have my students use food labels and write down what they eat on a daily basis and calculate if they are eating too much per day or not enough on a regular diet. This way the students are doing a hands on activity and solving the problem of how much serving sizes they are getting in a day and if they are gaining or losing weight. I also do a unit on decision making. I will give my students scenario that they might deal with as an adolescent and the students will respond to the scenario by writing down all the possible solutions and then coming up with a decision. After the class does practice scenarios, I will have the students make up their own scenario, which could be actually something that happened to them so they can relate it more to themselves and have others help them with a positive and healthy decision in class. To make some of the units I teach more realistic to them, we will go on field trips. During the nutrition unit, we go to a “Feed My Starving Children” trip where the students help make packaged food for children in need. This is a great opportunity for students to learn about serving sizes and nutrition. This field trip is also a hands on activity where the students are actually learning and doing the work themselves. The students can understand how the foods they are packaging are healthy and can last a long time for children to eat it. I will have the students watch videos that can help them link real life situations to their own. I also have guests speakers come in to class so my students can ask them questions about what that person has gone through and connect with someone that has really faced the problem or disease we are learning about in class. Lastly, I have the students choose a topic in health that relates to them personally, whether it be a disease in the family, death, illness, drugs, alcohol use etc. And the students do a presentation on it and present it to the class. That way the student is being active in their learning because they are learning about the information and presenting it in their own way. The book talks about building on prior knowledge so that the brain seeks meaningful patterns. Every new experience causes the brain to search through its existing networks to find a connection. It’s important that I figure out what my students already know or have experienced in order to tie in new learning to what we are learning about. The K-W-L strategy is something I use for getting to know my students prior knowledge of a subject. For the “know step”- I initiate a discussion with the students about what they already know about tobacco, smoking, cancer, nutrition, and other health topics we might learn in class. I ask the students to provide information about where and how they learned the information. Then I help them organize the brainstormed ideas into general categories. For the "want to learn" Step: I discuss with the students what they want to learn from the health topic we are going to learn. I will then ask them to write down the specific