WBT Book Club: Chapters 1 & 2

This summer I will be participating in Whole Brain Teaching's Book Club.  If you would like to participate, you can get more information {HERE}.  My post today is a reflection on Chapters 1 & 2 with the directions/assignments coming directly from the book club.  I'd love to read your comments and feedback!

 

 

 

Reflections on Chapters 1 & 2:

Directions: Coach B says... "You've just been made principal of a charter school and you're about to address your staff for the first time. Select three points from chapters 1 and 2 that you are going to talk about describing key aspects of Whole Brain Teaching. Include one story about your teaching experience."
 
Last summer I was a frustrated teacher. I had a good class, but there were one or two kids that always seemed to be presenting behavior challenges. The more I tried strategies from my old bag of tricks, the worse it seemed to get. While looking online, I found many discussions, articles, and videos on Whole Brain Teaching and I was instantly intrigued.

Whole Brain Teaching is more than a management plan; it's a teaching style.  As Coach B says in his new book, Whole Brian Teaching for Challenging Kids, "if a student's whole brain is involved in learning, there isn't any mental area left over for challenging behavior". This is something that is often missing from the classroom today. As educators, we are presenting great lessons to our students. However, are we engaging them completely utilizing current brain research?

This leads to another point from Coach B.--the longer we talk, the more students we lose. We've all sat through a presentation with great material and an amazing presenter that was all talk.  How soon did we check out? In this same way, we can't expect our students, even the best behaved and most motivated, to sit through lecture after lecture.

That's where Whole Brain Teaching comes in.  It's a way of teaching that leads to total engagement no matter what you're teaching or to whom you're teaching it! It's also been proven to work from kindergarten to college. By using these methods, we will be creating classrooms that enable students to see, hear, say, and move about to learn. Those challenging kids that we've all had will be experiencing learning in a new way that will keep their brains so busy learning, they won't have time to be "challenging".  Sounds like the classrooms we all want to be in and create for our students.  Let’s get ready to do it!