Applying Brain-Friendly Instructional Practices

Applying Brain-Friendly Instructional Practices - One principal's advice: start with a group of motivated teachers to plant the seeds of climate change.

"Many teachers working in our classrooms were trained at universities when the coursework coursework focused exclusively on how to teach rather than on how students learn. Certainly many of their teaching strategies are highly successful, though they've been based on tradition, trial and error or intuition alone. During the last two decades, advances in medical technology have allowed scientists and physicians to better understand how the brain functions when performing tasks. Although there is undoubtedly much more to learn, educators are becoming privy to physiological learning data in students' brains. Consequently, we can discover why particular instructional strategies have always worked well and also what new teaching and learning practices will yield even more successful results. In a few words, we have the potential of teaching in ways that consistently will be best for our students' brains."