Brain-Based Learning Strategies: Maximizing Learning Potential

Brain-based learning is an educational approach grounded in neuroscience, aiming to optimize teaching methods, lesson designs, and school programs. It considers factors like cognitive development and how students learn differently as they age, grow, and mature socially, emotionally, and cognitively. This article explores effective brain-based learning strategies to enhance student performance and success.

Understanding Brain-Based Learning

Brain-based learning involves creating conditions that increase student motivation, engagement, and long-term retention by tapping into the natural ways the brain receives, processes, and stores information. It leverages findings from neuroscience research to improve students’ knowledge retention and performance. This approach can be applied to classroom teaching methods, lesson planning, curriculum design, and any other educational engagement.

A key principle is neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to change and reorganize itself to receive and retain new information. Motivation, stress, challenge, and emotional state influence neuroplasticity, especially in young, developing brains. Educators can build lessons that are more likely to "stick" by understanding how neuroplasticity works.

Core Principles of Brain-Based Learning

Several core principles underpin brain-based learning:

Experience: Building lessons around the way students receive and retain information.
Flow: Creating a state of engagement and optimal challenge in the learning process.
"Sticky" Learning: Designing lessons to encourage students’ neuroplasticity and optimal knowledge retention.

Effective Brain-Based Learning Strategies

1. Creating a Positive and Safe Learning Environment

Students must feel physically and emotionally safe in the classroom for real learning to take place. Creating a positive classroom environment where students feel supported and encouraged opens the doors for optimal learning. Welcoming students each day can increase engagement, and setting a positive tone with classroom greetings creates a sense of community.

2. Encouraging Discussion and Collaboration

When students talk about concepts they’ve learned, they’re more likely to retain the information. Implementing "turn and talk" time into lessons helps students process what they’ve just read, discuss ideas before sharing them with the class, and clarify problems they may have had while completing homework. This gives them a chance to describe what they’ve learned in their own words and helps them explain their thoughts to their classmates. Utilizing the raise hand feature in video conferencing platforms can make this more organized in virtual settings.

3. Utilizing Visual Aids

Many people are visual learners who absorb and recall information best by seeing. Visual elements provide additional context to lessons. Breaking up slides with a GIF that calls students’ attention back during a lecture or finding a quick video of science concepts are simple ways to hold student interest remotely. Changing out a virtual background to align with the theme of a lesson or wearing a decorative item are other fun ways to incorporate visual elements.

4. Chunking Information

Chunking, or breaking down difficult or large pieces of text into smaller pieces, helps students identify key words and phrases, paraphrase, and understand the text in their own words. It can also be used to break down instruction into smaller, manageable pieces. Working through lengthy instructions step by step with students helps them understand each piece of what is being asked of them.

5. Incorporating Brain Breaks

Brain breaks are a great way to get students up and moving, and they have been shown to increase brain activity. Incorporating some movement into the day can help with fidgetiness resulting from sitting at desks for long periods.

6. Retrieval Practice

Retrieval practice, or the practice of remembering, is a robust learning strategy. It involves pushing oneself to write, tell, or draw what one has already learned, which can be especially helpful for concepts not remembered as clearly. The process of remembering strengthens memory and identifies what one knows and doesn’t know.

Read also: Engaging All Brain Parts

Create a study guide with only the questions: Ask students to practice answering them without additional support. Once they’re done, they can share their answers or look up the correct answers, either alone or in groups.
Use a brain dump: Ask students to write down everything they remember relevant to a question (or the topic) on a piece of paper. Students can then compare their work to find gaps, similarities, and differences.

7. Elaboration

Elaboration refers to expanding a concept to be more detailed, allowing the brain to connect multiple concepts to one central idea. The more connections made, the more likely one is to remember relevant information. In a learning context, elaboration can often be done by asking questions that require engaging deeply with content, encouraging learners to compare and contrast right and wrong answers.

Ask learners to compare two examples of the same concept or share specific examples: For example, when covering concepts of reusable energy, ask questions such as, “What are three similarities and differences between wind and solar energy?”
Learners can explain the topic out loud to themselves, friends, a sibling, or a parent: This can be incorporated into group activities-like a jigsaw-or students can role-play as the teacher and explain the topic to the class.

8. Concept Mapping

Concept mapping combines retrieval practice and elaboration through the process of drawing one’s understanding of relationships between concepts. A map usually contains at least two concepts (nouns), a relationship (verb or concise description), and a directional arrow connecting the concepts. This layout allows learners to identify what they know and where the gaps are, in addition to the relationships between concepts.

The six stages in concept mapping are:

Focusing stage: Learners are given or are asked to identify a guiding question relevant to the current topic.
Brainstorming stage (making use of retrieval practice): Learners do a brain dump in response to the guiding question, writing down any concepts and ideas that come to mind.
Organizing stage (elaboration): Learners review their brain dump and pick out concepts that are central to the guiding question, followed by asking themselves, “How are these concepts connected?”
Layout stage: Learners build their map connecting the concepts with directional arrows showcasing their understanding.
Linking stage: They complete the first draft of the concept map by labeling the arrows with descriptions.
Revising stage: Learners are given the opportunity to redo and update based on their understanding.

9. Incorporating Art and Aesthetics

The human brain loves aesthetic experiences found in artworks. Processing aesthetically pleasing artwork activates “reward-related brain areas,” which in turn increases “the individual predisposition to cognitive activities such as learning.” Arts and aesthetic experiences can rewire the brain. When planning lessons, seek out activities that connect artworks to learning goals. Even just incorporating some color into a lesson can reap benefits. Students may remember information better when it is color coded.

10. Utilizing Music

Music can help with regulating emotions in the classroom. Upbeat music can help with “enlivening children who appear lethargic,” while relaxing music “can create calm to help them wind down.” Listening to music appears to help students access parts of their brains that function poorly or not at all. Music benefits learning across other special populations, too, such as students learning a second language or students with autism.

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11. Allowing Content to Settle

The brain is not a computer that can simply be reprogrammed to learn something new. It learns in smaller pieces that require time to be integrated into a larger body of understanding. After a learning session, give students a way to let the content settle, such as taking a break, shifting gears to an unrelated task, or planning the lesson so that an important learning task falls at the end of the day.

12. Student-Centered Instruction

Student-centered instruction involves having students share in classroom decision-making, differentiating instruction, having learners engage in joint problem-solving, providing activities with an active, or constructivist, approach to learning, using diagnostic and formative assessments, and using technology to personalize instruction. The person doing the work is the one doing the learning.

13. Multisensory Learning

Engaging multiple senses in lessons, like touch or sound, may make students more likely to understand and retain information.

14. Experiential Learning

Experiential learning (also known as “hands-on” learning) encourages students to put concepts they learn in class to the test and both practice and reflect on them.

15. Promoting Movement

When students are able to take stretch breaks, go for short walks, or otherwise move their bodies during lessons, the more engaged they will be when they come back.

16. Connecting Learning to Real Life

Lessons and assignments that incorporate varied modes of delivery give students a better chance of logging information in their long-term memory. Academic concepts can often feel disconnected from students’ actual lives. Making learning relevant to students’ lives and interests can increase motivation and engagement.

17. Optimizing the Learning Environment

Learning environments should meet basic needs, including physical and psychological safety, while also facilitating autonomy, relatedness, and competence. Teachers who create calm, pleasant, and orderly learning environments give students’ brains an optimal environment to learn and grow in.

18. Active Problem Solving

Optimal brain-based learning allows students to solve problems actively and explore solutions through different sensory modalities. Immersive learning activities that involve movement can help students develop new insights.

19. Chunking for Memory

Most learners can hold about six to eight items in their working memory. By creating small groups or “chunks” of items, students can remember far more.

20. Encouraging a Growth Mindset

Learning effective memorization strategies can boost students’ confidence and frame retention as a fun challenge. As students realize they can increase their ability to retain information, they may take a growth mindset toward their learning potential.

21. Introducing Novelty

When learners see something new, dopamine levels increase in the brain as students know the stimuli have the potential to reward them in some way. This motivates learners to seek out the reward. There are a huge number of opportunities to introduce novelty in eLearning courses simply by being creative.

22. Leveraging Color

As color connects neuropathways, people remember colors better than verbal or textual cues alone. Yellow and pink can improve memory, green and blue help students relax and lead to increased concentration, and red leads to a release of adrenaline and can be aggravating. Researchers have found that blue or black on a white background is the best for overall comprehension and retention.

23. Fostering Social Interaction

Neuroscience research underlines the brain’s inherently social nature. Humans are social animals, and working together can enhance learning. Effective eLearning courses should include plenty of opportunities for social interaction that enables learners to increase their comprehension and retention of new information.

24. Evoking Emotion

Emotions are pivotal to attention, perception, memory, and problem-solving. When the amygdala, the emotional part in the center of the brain, notices that content has a high emotional value, it considers this material to be more important. Learners remember these stimuli more easily. Storytelling is one of the best ways to evoke emotions such as risk, excitement, urgency, and pleasure.

Brain-Based Learning in eLearning

There is a simple way to design effective eLearning courses about any subject: brain-based learning. The idea behind the concept is that learning is innate and linked to biological and chemical processes in the human brain. Many eLearning professionals start their courses by activating prior knowledge, which helps learners build on what they already know and strengthens connections in the brain. Many use a variety of media types that help students think visually, kinesthetically, and phonetically.

Creating brain-based courses is relatively easy, especially when following the acronym B.R.A.I.N. B.A.S.E.D.:

Breaks: Vary instructional activities and spend no more than 12 to 15 minutes of focused attention on passive learning.
Repeat: Repeat information in a variety of ways such as video, images, charts, before and after modules, and graphic organizers.
Activate: Get students actively involved through physical or mental performance.
Image: Pair concepts with meaningful images.
Novelty: Introduce novelty in eLearning courses simply by being creative.
Be Curious: Trigger the unnoticeable or subtle aspects of your learners’ experience.
All Together: Include plenty of opportunities for social interaction.
Storytelling: Evoke emotions such as risk, excitement, urgency, and pleasure.
Emotional Value: When the amygdala, the emotional part in the center of the brain, notices that content has a high emotional value, it considers this material to be more important.
Do: Including problem-solving in eLearning makes content more relatable to the real world.

Benefits of Brain-Based Learning

The benefits of brain-based learning are significant:

Improved Academic Outcomes: Using psychological or scientific theories of learning can have profound benefits on grades.
Enhanced Social-Emotional Development: Brain-based learning can affect a student’s ability to understand and regulate their emotions.
Increased Motivation and Engagement: When a student’s sense of belonging increases, their engagement also increases. Making learning relevant to students’ lives and interests can increase motivation and engagement.
Deeper Knowledge Retention: Aligning teaching with how the brain naturally processes information helps students engage more deeply and retain knowledge longer.
Development of Critical Thinking and Creativity: Encouraging students to analyze problems independently and explore solutions helps them to take ownership of their learning journey, sparking creativity and strengthening critical thinking skills.

Implementing Brain-Based Learning

Incorporating brain-based learning into the in-person, online, or blended classroom is easier than you think. By understanding how the brain learns best, educators can create engaging, effective classrooms. Curriculum and instruction leaders are pivotal in integrating brain-based learning strategies into education, ensuring teachers have the means to incorporate these strategies into their classrooms.

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