The Learning Brain - Suggestions for Teachers

We have shown you a little about how the brain learns, but how does this relate to your practice on a day-to-day basis? Below we have crafted a list of hints, many of which you are no doubt already using in your work. When reading these hints it is important to bear in mind that this is not a case of “one size fits all” because as you know the brain is deeply personalised. Indeed, it is unlikely that you consider any two children in your class to be identical learners, but we hope these hints help you in creating a neuroscientific teaching style and environment.

1. 1. Wherever possible relate the subjects you are teaching to the child’s prior knowledge, experiences and personal goals, i.e. demonstrate the relevance of the topic to them.
2. 2. Build on existing knowledge in order to feed into the ready made networks of activation in the brain.
3. 3. The brain is a natural pattern detector so help pupils to see patterns and use them to predict outcomes where possible.
4. 4. Try and give pupils a concrete demonstration of abstract or otherwise unobservable concepts. This allows their senses to experience the concept firsthand and could even involve physical movement, for example having the children pair up as bases in DNA helices or being the electrons in chemical reactions.
5. 5. Attention can be gained either through attention-grabbing stimuli (bottom- up) or through voluntary direction (top-down). For example the bottom-up approach may require an “over-the-top” chemical reaction or emotive video clip, whilst the top-down approach may relate to assessment requirements. It may be helpful to use both approaches at different stages in the learning; the bottom-up approach is likely to arouse curiosity which may then result in directed attention to discover the underlying causes or understanding.
6.