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Brain Rules by
John Medina
These are simply my notes put onto slides – very simple, very basic. This
is not an attempt at a polished presentation.
Again, these are my notes, not necessarily quotes from the book.
There is not enough time in my life to polish this presentation and apply the “Brain Rules” to it.
If my typoographical erors disturb you, or it upsets you that I gave up trying to find pictures slides, or it
bugs you that I was obviously falling asleep during chapter 6
because there is only one note, please put in your yoga DVD instead of watching this slide
show...
…or better yet email me ([email protected]) to let me
know what to fix or if you have any suggestions for copyright free images to use.
All that said, I highly recommend the book. Yes The World is Flat
might open your eyes to what our future holds, but this book will
introduce to you how you should be teaching your students to be
prepared for that future now.
So here we go…enjoy!
“If you wanted to create an education
environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you
probably would design something like
a classroom.” p5
#1 Exercise
ExerciseRule #1 Exercise
boosts brain power
When kids get to aerobically
exercise during school, their brains
work better.
Rule #2Survival
SurvivalRule #2 The human brain evolved, too
If someone does not feel safe with a teacher, they will not be able to
perform as well.p46If a kid does not feel safe with a teacher,
they will not to perform as well.
If you have a student that feels
misunderstood because you
cannot connect with the way the they learn, the
student can become isolated.
WiringRule #3 Every Brain is wired
differently
Smaller classrooms create better
learning environments.
Given that each brain is wired differently, being able to read your students’ mind is a powerful tool.
Getting to know each student allows you to know when students are confused or engaged...
…or whether your teaching is being transformed into
learning.
AttentionRule #4 We
don’t pay attention to
boring things
If your kids are paying attention,
they will learn more.
How long before your kids lose interest never to
return?10 minutes
Use messages that grab their
attention and are connected to
memory, interest, and awareness.
Students use prior experiences to
predict whether
they should pay attention.
Use novel stimuli – be unusual,
unpredictable, or distinctive –to get the kid’s attention
Tap into the student’s emotions to get their
attention.
Students will remember emotionally arousing lessons.
Kids are terrific pattern matchers, constantly assessing their environment for similarities,
and they tend to remember things if they think they have seen them before.
Start lessons with concepts and go to details. Give them
meaning before details.
Getting kids emotionally aroused focuses attention on the “gist’ of an
experience at the expense of peripheral details.
Students’ memories record the gist of what they encounter, not by keeping a
literal record of the experience.
With the passage of time, students retrieval of gist always trumps their recall of details…
…which means their heads fill with generalized pictures of concepts or
events, not with slowly fading minutiae.
Student’s memory is enhanced by creating associations between
concepts.
Words presented in a logically organized hierarchal structure are
much better remembered than words placed randomly
If students can derive the meaning of the words to one another, we can
much more easily recall the details.
Always give the kids the meaning before the details.
What separates novices from experts?
“Experts knowledge is not simply a list of facts and formulas that are relevant to their
domain; instead their knowledge is organized around core concepts or ‘big ideas’ that guide
their thinking about their domains.”
Research shows we cannot multitask—we are biologically incapable of processing attention-rich inputs
simultaneously.
Students who are interrupted take 50% longer to accomplish a task, and makes 50% or more errors.
Giving your kids too much information without enough time to digest it
sacrifices learning for expediency.
Break classes into 10 minute segments. First minute the gist,
the next nine the details
Teacher should start with a where we are going at the start, with where we are throughout – stops students from having to figure it out and multitask.
At the end of each ten minutes there should be a hook, looking backwards, or forward – and always triggering an
emotion.
Short Term Memory Rule #5 Repeat to remember
Students forget 90% of what they learn in class within 30 days. The majority of this forgetting occurs within the first few
hours after class.
Memory worked best if the environmental conditions at retrieval
mimicked the environmental conditions at encoding.
Information is best remembered when it is elaborate, meaningful, and contextual. The
quality of the encoding stage – those earliest moments of learning – is one of the single
greatest predictors of later learning success.
When you are trying to drive a piece of information into a kids memory system,
make sure they know what it means.
First moments of a class are vitally important.
Memory of an event is stored in the same places that were initially recruited
to perceive the learning event.
The more the brain structures involved during the initial introduction to the
information, the easier it is to recall the information.
Teach information and skills in the same way, in the same environment, and with the same tools in which they
will be tested.
Your chances of remembering something increase if you reproduce
the environment in which you first put it into your brain.
Long Term Memory Rule #6 Remember to Repeat
Memory may not be fixed at the moment of learning, but repetition,
doled out in specifically time intervals, is fixative.
Thinking or talking about a lesson immediately after it has occurred enhances memory for that event.
Memory loss in the first hour or two after a class can be lessened
by deliberate repetition.
The probability of confusion is increased when content is delivered in unstoppable,
unrepeated waves, poured into students as if they were wooded forms.
Better to space out repetitions than to do them all at once.
Deliberately re-expose yourself to information more elaborately if you want the retrieval to be of higher
quality.
Deliberately re-expose yourself to information more elaborately and in
fixed spaced intervals if you want the retrieval to be the most vivid it can be.
Learning occurs best when new information is incorporated gradually
into the memory store rather than when it is jammed in all at once.
The brains excitement when introduced to something new will
last only an hour or two.
If it is not re-energized with 90 minutes the excitement will vanish and will re-set to zero ready to accept the next
signal that might come its way.
How do you get it to stay permanent? The information must be repeated after
a period of time has passed.
It could take years for your brain to put something into its long-term
storage.
Forgetting allows us to prioritize events.
We assign them the same priority as events critical to our survival. If we
deem them as unimportant, we forget them.
If students forget something, it was because the weren’t presented in a way to show the students that it was
important in their life.
SleepRule #7
Sleep loss = Brain Drain
Sleep loss means mind loss. Sleep loss cripples thinking, in just about
everyway you can measure thinking.
Sleep loss hurts attention, executive function, immediate memory, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning ability,
and general math knowledge.
Eventually, sleep loss affects fine and gross motor control
movements.
Sleep is intimately involved in learning.
Sleep hormones are at their maximum levels in the teenage brain making
them want to sleep more in the morning.
StressRule #8 Stressed brains don’t
learn the same way
After being shut down again and again there is a learned
helplessness.
Certain types of stress hurt learning, some types boost
learning.
Bad stress = cause of stress is out of student’s control
Our stress response systems were shaped to solve problems
that lasted for seconds, not years.
How long does the stress of a school day last? Mom and dad
divorcing? A Bully?
Prolonged stress effects memory, math skills, concentration, problem solving, and almost any other type of cognitive
skills that can be tested.
One of the greatest predictors of performance in school is the
emotional stability of the home.
The ability of the student to do well in your class might have
nothing to do with your teaching.
In a knowledge based economy where problem solving and creativity is key, stress is a major issue that must be
dealt with.
Sensory IntegrationRule #9 Stimulate more of the senses
Groups in multisensory environments always do better than groups in
unisensory environments. They have more accurate recall…
…even twenty years later.
The following is Richard Mayer’s rules for multimedia presentations:
1) Multimedia principle: Students learn better from words and pictures than words alone
2) Temporal Contiguity Principle: Students learn better when
corresponding words and pictures are presented simultaneously
rather than successively.
3) Spatial contiguity principle: Students learn better when corresponding words
and pictures are presented near to each other rather than far from each
other on the page or screen
4) Coherence principle: Students learn better when extraneous
material is excluded.
5) Modality principal: Students learn better from animation and narration
than from animation and on-screen text
Smell-exposed groups can retrieve twice as many memories
as the controls.
Most critical time to use multisensory approach in classroom is during an
introduction.
The right smell in a store can double sales. Can the right smell in a classroom “double” learning?
VisionRule #10 Vision trumps all other senses
Vision is probably the best single tool we have for learning anything.
People will remember 10% of information presented orally
tested 72 hours after exposure…
…add an image and it goes up to 65%.
One of the reasons that words are less efficient than images is because the
brain sees words as lots of tiny pictures.
Reading creates a bottleneck --- text chokes the brain.
To our cortex, there is no such thing as words.
Simple, two dimensional pictures are quite adequate. If a picture is too
complex it could take away from the transfer of information.
GenderRule #11 Male and Female
Brains are different
Girls are better at verbal memory tasks, verbal fluency tasks, and
speed of articulation.
When girl friends communicate with each other, they lean in, maintain eye
contact, and do a lot of talking.
Girls use sophisticated verbal talents to cement relationships.
Boys cement relationships by hitting one another ; )
Boys say “Do this.”
Girls say “Let’s do this.”
Males and females process emotions differently.
Females perceive their emotional landscape with more data points –
detail – and see it in greater resolution, women have more information to which
they can react.
ExplorationRule #12 We are powerful and
natural explorers
Exploration creates the need for more discovery so that more joy
can be experienced.
How to get more exploring into schools?
1) Consistent exposure to the real world.
2) Consistent exposure to those that operate in the real world.
3) Consistent exposure to real research.
“The greatest Brain Rule of all is something I cannot prove or
characterize…it is the importance of curiosity.”
Again, I know this presentation did not follow the “Brain Rules.” I simply ran out of time.
But if you have any suggestions for images or other ideas I would be happy to use them!
