Make Teaching Meaningful to Bring Learning to Life

by Guest Blogger Donna Wilson

When we speak to teachers, one of the things they consistently tell us is how much value they find in the BrainSMART: 60 Strategies for Increasing Student Learning text. Some of many strategies we teach in this text help teachers to teach students how to remember important information. For example, the brain is somewhat like a computer. It acts as if it has a save key and a delete key. It automatically deletes the meaningless information we receive on a daily basis. To promote learning and therefore initiate the "save key," we need to make the information we teach meaningful to young students.

Engage the Senses for a Total Learning Experience

by Guest Blogger Donna Wilson

We experience the world through our senses—through sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile impressions. The more fully we engage our senses, the more we experience and the more we learn.

We recommend that teachers use multiple sensory learning activities whenever possible to help students better understand and integrate the use of cognitive assets in their studies and in their lives. Encourage students to create graphics to illustrate these cognitive assets by drawing the concepts on which they are based and creating posters.

Our use of the brain car graphic, which underscores the importance of driving our own learning, is a popular example of how graphics can make a lesson memorable. Similarly, using a model of a brain can help effectively teach the concept of metacognition.

Regular Exercise Leads to Better Health for the Body and the Brain

by Guest Blogger Donna Wilson

Happy New Year! With a new year may come a resolution to get into shape. Last week, we posted about the importance of eating well. In tandem with that comes the need for regular exercise.

Exercise not only can lead to a healthier life but also can lead to a more academically accomplished life as well. In our book, Thinking for Results: Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement By As Much as 30 Percent, we cite research suggesting that movement is essential for the Body-Brain System to be in a peak state for thinking and learning.

Even just standing and walking can increase the blood supply to the thinking areas of the brain significantly. Additionally, breakthroughs in cognitive neuroscience show that various movements require extremely high levels of cognitive function.

Eat Well in the New Year

by Guest Blogger Donna Wilson

Almost everyone's holiday season has included a wide variety of food and drink, not all of it completely healthy for us. After indulging over the holidays, many of us are making ourselves and/or our loved ones a promise to eat healthier in the new year.

For people who maintain healthy eating habits, food is the pharmacy of feeling good and staying focused and energized, or relaxed and calm.

In our book Thinking for Results: Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement By As Much as 30 Percent, we explain that healthy eating is important for fueling the Body-Brain System.

Helping Young Students Achieve Self-Control

by Guest Blogger Donna Wilson

Helping students achieve self-control is an important component of teachers' ability to be effective in the classroom.

The famous marshmallow test, which was conducted more than 40 years ago by psychologist Water Mischel, was a breakthrough in the study of self-control in children. Most educators are familiar with this study, which tested preschool-age children's ability to delay immediate gratification for increased benefits in the future.

In the study, a researcher placed a marshmallow (or other desirable treat) on a table in front of a child. The child was left alone in the room for 15 minutes with the instruction not to eat the treat until the researcher returned to the room. If the child was able to do so, he or she was rewarded with a second treat.

Focusing on Student Motivation

by Guest Blogger Donna Wilson

Do you believe students become smarter through learning or that intelligence is determined at birth? How we as educators answer that question ties into the subject of motivation as a force for learning.

For me, the importance of motivation surfaced in the early 1980s while I was working with a group of seventh-grade students who had been classified as "gifted."

Some of these students were highly motivated to achieve while others were less motivated and underachieving. This latter group seemed to believe that because they were "smart," they did not need to put forth much effort in school. In contrast, their higher-achieving peers seemed to understand that they needed to put forth effort in order to reach their potential and achieve better results in school.

Increasing Selective Attention at School and in Life

by Guest Blogger Donna Wilson

We are bombarded by so much information in the course of our daily lives that it is easy to get distracted from what we should or would like to accomplish. One of the most valuable “cognitive assets,” in our Thinking for Results approach (Wilson & Conyers, 2011) is what we call Selective Attention.

Selective Attention is defined as "the skill of identifying what is important to any situation and attending to what is necessary with appropriate focus." Effective teachers guide their students to  identify what is most important in learning situations so that they can attend to necessary tasks with appropriate focus.

While attending the Cognitive Neuroscience of Learning symposium a few years ago, Marcus and I had the opportunity to see Professor Amishi Jha from the University of Miami report on her research with "mindfulness practice" as a way to improve attentional control.