Brain Agility & Fitness

Learning and teaching are brain intensive exercises that require us to have healthy brains.

To enhance our students’ brain flexibility, capacity to learn new thing and to retrieve things from their memories, we must encourage them to:

• to regularly exercise their brains by thinking creatively about their interests and thinking critically about complex issues; rubrics and thinking tools are excellent strategies to use for this
• apply and extend their thinking to new situations; both at school and at home
• solve games of strategy; there are numerous computer based games available
• do crosswords, Sudoko, logic puzzles, word searches and solve Maths problems
• play Scrabble, Monopoly, cards, Chess and other thinking games
• complete jigsaws and pursuits that require them to discover patterns
• share jokes, find humour, laugh, write funny stories and rhyming poems.

Thinking is to the brain, is what exercise is to the body. Running out of physical energy through lack of exercise can be mirrored by students, finding great difficulty in focussing their minds to strategically and logically think through issues. 

The ability to keep our students’ brains 'present' and 'in the zone' must be nurtured and practised often; otherwise their minds lose their sharpness, edge and thinking strength.

How often do we forget someone’s name almost immediately after being introduced to him/her? Or 'misplace' things we had in our hands a few minutes earlier?

The reason is quite simple; our brain is not alert and tuned into the present. The brain thrives on patterns and repetition, and therefore continually using the above exercises will provide our students with a mental boost. 

The brain is highly sophisticated and can perform hundreds of thousands of electrical operations each and every second. The quality of these operations is reliant on our brain’s awareness and health

When students learn material, their brains initially store it in their short term memory:

• If they do not revisit the material within 24 hours, the majority of it is lost forever; why learn it in the first place? It’s like filling a bucket with a hole in it. (read “Remembering: A smarter way” in the Senior planner).
• Therefore, as equally important as planning how we are going to teach a topic, we should be planning how we are going to organise a structured revision program for our students to retain their learning. We can be sure that very few of them can do this without our direct assistance – this must be explicitly taught.
• By continually revisiting what they have learnt, our students’ brains are in the process of transferring the material from short term memory to embedding it in their long term memory.
• The brain thrives on seeking patterns and routines; we have to put these opportunities in place for our students.

The brain also struggles to work effectively or efficiently when there are competing demands on its attention. Many students enjoy background sounds and images such as listening to music or watching a TV while learning new things. The reality is that their memory uptake of the material they are trying to learn is severely impacted upon, because their brains’ attention is distracted away from the task of memory storage.

To give their brains the best opportunity to retain what they learn, we need to teach them about how their brains function and what does and doesn’t work; an excellent strategy, that really engages students, is for them to dissect a brain and learn about what each part does.

“Be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid only of standing still.” Chinese Proverb