Engagement activity 3- How the brain works best- Implications and benefits in the classroom

Hi, my name is Jody Richter. I am studying my Bachelor of Learning Management, Early Childhood.  It is my goal to become a teacher who has the ability to excite students to learn in an environment that is stimulating, creative, interesting and caters for individual learning styles (embedding the "voki" took me over an hour, googled how to on youtube and yay it worked).

This presentation reminded me of my last assessment for SOSE, using the "tune" in strategy to gain student's interest at the beginning of a lesson. This form of teaching is an ideal scenario for the contemporary students in our society. Understanding how the brain works is an extremely important factor to consider when planning for lessons. According to Dr Judy Willis igniting student's interest using all the senses is the beginning of moving past the reticular activating system (RAS) allowing the information to move into the thinking brain.

Behaviour issues occur when students become bored. There are several strategies teachers can implement to provide environments that benefit the classroom, such as:

• Know your learners- "Kid watching", Take observations that you can use in lessons, for example using the students name and an observation in a scenario. This strategy would provoke the student's interest and encourage learning.
• Use the senses to engage them, ask open-ended questions about the item they are exploring. Ask the students to come up with ideas about what they might be learning about.
• Here, me and know strategy, understand the students individual interests and learning styles, this will help keep the students interested in the topic.
• Use non threatening facial expressions, this prepares the students for learning that is relaxed and stress free.
• Use small white boards for students to confidently share their responses to group questions without the threat of feeling embarrassed about being wrong. This strategy also allows the Teacher to gain an understanding of the students individual understanding of the topic.
• Ball toss review- through the ball to different students and ask a review question about the topic.

The implications to current teaching methods would be time management. The curriculum requires a lot of information to shared with students in a short time frame. Using these techniques would be ideal, student's and Teachers would benefit from individualised strategies, but time is a huge factor. The Prep room that I have volunteered in, the Teacher is trying to encourage creativity, but the use of C2C and worksheet activities sometimes is overwhelming for the student's causing the Flight, Flight, Freeze, which can form misdiagnosis for student's.  Classroom stress can be a problem, as the content of the curriculum can be very structured and creativity is often not encouraged. It is my goal as a future teacher to continue to create stress free environments that excite students to learn.