Brain Blast: Strategies for Classes with BIG Learning Differences

Brainy Teacher’s Weekly Transmitter #45 – Sept 26th – Oct 2nd 2016

Quick Navigation Brain Hacks What is Your Sleep Chronotype? Take the 45-Second QuizIs Social Proof Undermining Your Classroom Management?Teaching StrategiesSarah Tantillo’s 2-Step Paraphrasing StrategyIdeas for Combined-Level ClassroomsThinking MovesNumbersTech WatchName RandomizerRemediation Tech Tools: Educreations, ShowMe, PayPosit & EdPuzzleResearchSTUDY: Do Freshman Really Gain 15 Pounds? STUDY: Bonus of Being Tight-A**ed Introvert STUDY: Neuroscience Study Weighs in on Phonics-Based Reading InstructionWeekly […]

BRAIN BLAST: Flash Card Kung Fu

Once a week, I release a strategy poster or “Brain Blast” designed to be consumed quickly by time-pressed teachers. Weekly Teaching Strategies Based on Neuroscience I’m In lorem ipsum dolor

BRAIN BLAST: Post-Reading Journal Alternatives

Every Wednesday, I release a strategy poster or “Brain Blast” – a departure from the longer Monday blog posts. These are instructional snacks, designed to be consumed by time-pressed teachers in 9 seconds or less. Here’s an example of a Todd’s Brain Newsletter. Weekly Teaching Strategies Based on Neuroscience I’m In lorem ipsum dolor

Brain Blast: How to Learn Students’ Names

Teacher Effectiveness Challenge Chart

In one page, here are a number of habits that will increase your teaching productivity and resilience. Link to Challenge Chart (PDF) 1. MEDITATE – For 11 minutes (11 minutes gives you 90% of the benefits of longer sessions) meditate, focusing on your breathe. Scientifically verified benefits of meditation include: increased happiness, decreased anxiety and stress, […]

3 Ways to Make a Diverse Class Act Like a Team

Diversity in schools and in the U.S. is not increasing, it’s exploding, thus necessitating that we teach our students to work productively with classmates who have different colored skin, are a different gender, hail from different social and cultural strata, and who generally think differently. There are three general things teachers can do to help […]

BRAIN BLAST: Halt Stress with Micro-Rest

Every Wednesday, I release a strategy poster or “Brain Blast” – a departure from the longer Monday blog posts. These are instructional snacks, designed to be consumed by time-pressed teachers in 9 seconds or less. Weekly Teaching Strategies Based on Neuroscience I’m In lorem ipsum dolor Here’s an example of a Todd’s Brain Newsletter.

BRAIN BLAST: Set Strong Classroom Norms

Every Wednesday, I release a strategy poster or “Brain Blast” – a departure from the longer Monday blog posts. These are instructional snacks, designed to be consumed by time-pressed teachers in 9 seconds or less. Weekly Teaching Strategies Based on Neuroscience I’m In lorem ipsum dolor

BRAIN BLAST: Make Classroom Chats Friendly to Introverts

Every Wednesday, I release a strategy poster or “Brain Blast” – a departure from the longer Monday blog posts. These are instructional snacks, designed to be consumed by time-pressed teachers in 9 seconds or less. Weekly Teaching Strategies Based on Neuroscience I’m In lorem ipsum dolor

Turn Off Test Anxiety

Every Wednesday, I release a strategy poster or “Brain Blast” – a departure from the longer Monday blog posts. These are instructional snacks, designed to be consumed by time-pressed teachers in 9 seconds or less.

BRAIN BLAST: SUMMARIZERS

Every Wednesday, I release a strategy poster or “Brain Blast” – a departure from the longer Monday blog posts. These are instructional snacks, designed to be consumed by time-pressed teachers in 9 seconds or less. Weekly Teaching Strategies Based on Neuroscience. (Almost) Better than Tacos! I’m In lorem ipsum dolor

Save the World: Teach Students to UnTrump

You’d think that after 3% of the global population died during World War II, fascist leadership would fall out of fashion. Nope. Fascism is present in Russia, Turkey, Austria, Hungary, Poland, France, Germany, Greece and now the USA because of the Republican candidate for President, Donald Trump (he’s not the only one, but his political […]

BRAIN BLAST: New Vocabulary Learning Strategies

Every Wednesday, I release a strategy poster or “Brain Blast” – a departure from my longer Monday blog posts. These are instructional snacks, designed to be consumed by time-pressed teachers in 9 seconds or less. Get The Todd’s Brain Insider Newsletter Each Week. It includes Teaching Tips Not Published on this Blog. Keep up to date […]

Dump Scripted Curricula: 9 Ways to Plan a Teacher Created Unit

Every Wednesday, I release a strategy poster or “Brain Blast” – a departure from my longer Monday blog posts. These are instructional snacks, designed to be consumed by time-pressed teachers in 9 seconds or less. The 9 ways to organize a unit, below, comes from Michael Schiro’s work. Want Teaching Tips in Your Inbox Once a Week? […]

A Discussion Goes Off Topic-What Do You Say?

Every Wednesday, I release a strategy poster or “Brain Blast” – a departure from my longer Monday blog posts. These are instructional snacks, designed to be consumed by time-pressed teachers in 9 seconds or less.

Money and Common Sense Are Keys to Teacher Recruitment

Recruitment StrategiesIt is no mystery how to recruit effective teachers as ample research on the topic is available. Here are four surefire approaches:1. Offer service scholarships.According to Stanford Professor Linda Darling-Hammond, “Nearly all of the vacancies currently filled with emergency teachers could be filled with talented, well-prepared teachers if 40,000 service scholarships of up to […]

How to Add Active Learning Activities to Any Class

Every Wednesday, I release a strategy poster or “Brain Blast” — a departure from my longer Monday blog posts. These are instructional snacks, designed to be consumed by time-pressed teachers in 9 seconds or less.…starting now! Try my weekly newsletter, filled with teaching tips, new tech tools, neuroscience hacks, and more. If you don’t like […]

Brain Blast: Study Tips

Every Wednesday, I release a strategy poster or “Brain Blast” — a departure from my longer Monday blog posts. These are instructional snacks, designed to be consumed by time-pressed teachers in 9 seconds or less.…starting now! Subscribe to my Weekly Strategies Newsletter for Neuroscience-Based Teaching Strategies–Free!In the last 10 months since I began my Newsletter, […]

Writing to Change the Culture: A Woman’s Letter to the Freshman who Assaulted Her

Warning: This post discusses a sexual assault. Here’s a story about a heinous sexual assault against a 22 year old woman. We’ll call her Sarah–a pseudonym. It’s also about her superpower: writing. On Friday at midnight, I read a letter Sarah composed and read at the sentencing of her attacker, a Stanford freshman who was unanimously convicted of 3 felony sexual assault charges. Although […]

Brain Blast: 3 Metacognitive Ways End the School Year

Every Wednesday, I release a strategy poster or “Brain Blast”– a departure from my longer Monday blog posts. These are instructional snacks, designed to be consumed by time-pressed teachers in 9 seconds or less.

Family Reading Meeting

A while back, a mail carrier with “Thomas Jackson” on his uniform dropped off a package at my office. I see him regularly because I often one-click order presents for myself on Amazon (what I call a celebration of Todd, my wife calls a problem). On this occasion, Mr. Jackson noticed “English Education” on my door and asked if I had a moment […]

A Talk with Vicki Davis: Lower Test Anxiety and Improve Retention

Last week I was honored (and nervous) to speak with mega-education blogger Vicki Davis on her Every Classroom Matters Podcast. I’d met with Vicki during an Edutopia event a couple years ago when she introduced a bunch of bloggers to a social application we’d never heard of called Voxer. Anyway, Vicki and I talked about how to lower testing anxiety […]

Everything You Need to Assign and Teach Ignite Presentations

A good way to snore-fest your students at the end of the school year is to have everyone in class give a 20 minute speech. Thankfully, Ignite Presentations are a fantastic alternative. Because of its unique format, you can burn through 18 speeches in a 90 minute periods. And since students don’t read from notecards, there […]

Inspirational Video Blasts

Need a virtual pick-me-up for students? Or for yourself? This week’s post features 16 of the most motivational videos available on YouTube. Use them as blasts of motivation for you and your students. Meanwhile, keep on keepin’ on!Your Words and Thoughts have Physical Power – Will Smith Olympic Highlights 2012 – Music: by Gym Class Heroes feat. Ryan Tedder. Humans […]

Save Time Responding to Essays: Letter to the Class

Like anything in teaching, improving student writing is complicated, technical, subjective, and –at times–backbreaking. Over the years, I’ve picked up some writing instruction tenets that I’ve learned, and that are also supported by research: regularly assign a variety of writing genres, in and out of class.afford students opportunities to receive feedback (the sooner, the better).guide students through […]

Encouraging the Impulse to Annotate

Annotating has remained unidirectional—someone comments on a text —ever since novelists and scholars wrote prose to accompany Paradise Lost and didactic Greek verse.However, annotation does not adequately signify the complexity, creativity, and multiplicity of communication that have resulted from the Web 2.0 renaissance of (mostly) free social media tools–tools that make it easy and exhilarating to mashup, […]

How to Do Hard Things: Lessons Learned on a 303 Mile Run

May I tell you a story?Back when I was in the 6th grade, Mr. McKinney, my teacher at Marvista Elementary School in Des Moines Washington, paced off a running course on the elementary school grounds and announced that we’d have a contest to see who could run the farthest during recesses for 40 days. Like a lot […]

14 of the Best Election Podcasts

When were were mowing lawns as a kids, my brother and I tuned our radios to the only station that featured talk. Dirty and sweaty, we’d blissfully listen to adults talk about issues and pretend we were part of the adult world. In 2005, I listened to the few podcasts that were produced–mostly technology conference lectures. In 2016, […]

Classroom Design Quiz: Are You Up on the Research?

Last week, Rethinking Classroom Design: Create Student-Centered Learning Spaces for 6-12th Graders, was published. To highlight some of the research on classroom environments that Blake Wiggs and I reviewed while developing the book, we’ve created a quiz! Does florescent lighting hurt learning? What temperatures start to impair academic achievement? What kind of student doesn’t like to sit in […]

Your Principal Scores Your Teaching as “Developing”: How to Get Up Off the Mat

It’s a nightmare. After observing your third period, the school principal marked two elements of your instruction as developing. You try to apply growth mindset to the situation: “I’ll dig in and improve through sheer effort.” You try to re-center your emotions with braggadocio: “King Kong ain’t got nothin’ on me!” You go hyperbolic about relying more on student […]

QuizFizz: 20 Ways to Make Low-Stakes Assessments Delightful (And Useful)

In 1998 and again in 2006, I tried to give students low-stakes quizzes every time class met, but was unsuccessful. The level of stress these assessments brought about in students negatively impacted the remaining class time; fear and stress impair executive brain functioning. Also, scoring these quizzes was monotonous and swallowed my home-time like a black […]

Preventing New Teacher Burnout

A local doctor recently asked, “You know what two professions I prescribe the most anti-anxiety medication for? Cops and teachers.” This is not surprising, as rookie instructors possess energy and fear–two qualities that can lead to anxiety and burnout when struggling with what is arguably “the single most stressful job there is.”So how can school administrators unburden new […]

Teachers Aren’t Allowed to Pee and 9 Other School Exasperations

I don’t want to come off as sanctimonious (see a list of 20 mistakes I’ve made as a teacher), but some problems exist in education that don’t make sense to me, things related to classrooms design, institutional and teacher practices, and educational policies. Some are nagging little things that make me go hmmm, while others are egregious. I’ve […]

Is There Good Mind Control in Education?

Authors’s Note: While this personal meditation on coercive techniques uses the National Writing Project Summer Institute as an example, it should be noted that almost every elite institution has similar characteristics. The extraordinary work of NWP, its participants and leaders, has made an incalculably positive contribution to education.I Was a Cult Buster For a Brief Time in […]

Everything Your Brain Should Know About Speeding Up Student Email Communication

Frictionless Teacher-Student CommunicationDo you have an email policy that you share with students on the first day of class? I do, and it saves me buckets of time. The idea was “borrowed” years ago from Trey Martindale, a professor and Fellow of the University of Memphis Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning. He gets more email than Obama. […]

The Best Education Software Isn’t Education Software

How long have well-meaning adults undercut things that kids enjoy? Exchanging chocolate chip cookies with wheat germ bars (c’mon!), for example, or replacing neighborhood play with kid-friendly yoga. So it doesn’t surprise me when classroom software tries to combine arcade style gaming with skill building, or adds big buttons and garish colors reminiscent of Fisher […]

10 Shortcuts to Legendary Instruction

Maybe there is a faster way to turn novice into experts–to bypass the distance between two far away things like Mrs. Whatsit folds the universe in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. At the end of last semester, I watched videotape of new instructors teaching their first three lessons. For over 100 hours, I observed and noted […]

Kids’ Global Conversations are Being Livestreamed!

We all want to help students engage in global conversations that will allow them to leverage communities and knowledge, and maybe save the world. But we’re too distracted by the centuries-old debate over how learners should be educated. One side of the debate was enacted by the Roman Catholic Church between 500 A.D. and 1500 A.D. Throughout Europe, priests transmitted knowledge (scripture) via recitation and […]

Everything Your Brain Should Know about Teaching Grammar

The debate over grammar is not over whether it should be taught, but how. This post introduces a number of tactics. But let’s start with the fundamentals. There are 4 major ways grammar is taught: Decontextualized Exercises – Includes worksheets, handbook exercises, daily oral language, and bellringers.Contextualized Exercises – Problems chosen from students’ essays. These can also […]

Tentpole Teaching

In 2005, I remember telling a student that I was working on a ten-year plan. That is, I hoped to be a significantly different and better teacher in ten years. And I think I am, mostly because of tentpole teaching–where I try out a major new way of teaching each semester. If a big idea […]

9 High School Learning Games

Games unite many of the most powerful initiatives in education: problem based learning, brain-based strategies, technology, collaboration, inquiry, and student engagement. If you aren’t paying attention to gaming, you’re missing a major transformational force for student learning.With the help of Christine Leary, I’ve assembled 9 of the best technology-based learning games–a few of them are even […]

Talking Engagement with Edspiration

This week, I was interviewed on John Linney’s Edspiration podcast about a post that he read on this blog Everything Your Brain Needs to Know about How to Engage Students. Here are the highlights from that 30-minute interview. 1. What is a favorite quote that inspires you? Why?I customized one of those tacky silicone wristbands with […]

10 Things Your Brain Should Know about Standards Based Grading

Why STANDARDS BASED GRADING?The purpose of STANDARDS BASED GRADING is to provide a more accurate indicator of students level of achievement or performance (Stiggins, 2008) and to accurately link curriculum standards to grading.When did STANDARDS BASED GRADING start?The national standards-based reform movement that emerged in the 1990s called for “high standards for all students” to […]

16 Flicks about Teachers

Top Teaching DocumentariesNumber 7 It’s important for our students to see us there, and approachable, and in their community.” 180 Days: Harsville (2015) Number 6 We want technology to help us create an environment where students are active and engaged.” Future Learning (2012) Number 5 It’s the teacher’s job to point young minds towards the […]

Got Social Media? That’s Classroom Engagement

There is a tendency for each generation to privilege the popular literacies that they grew up with and dismiss literacies embraced by subsequent generations. For example, those milk toast Nancy Drew mysteries in the 1950s were lambasted by adults for causing kids to distrust authority. Today social media is similarly targeted by teachers as a […]

Everything Your Brain Needs to Know about Engagement

40 Strategies to Enhance Student EngagementWHAT IS ENGAGEMENT? Ask yourself, what affinity did you engage in when you were 12 that you had an absolute passion for? That is the definition of engagement. What does engagement feel like? Lean forward in your chair, than lean back. Feel the difference? Schoenbach and Cynthia Greenleaf define engagement: […]

How to Help Young Writers

This evening, I was interviewed about how to teach writing by an East Carolina University student, Mikel Peterson. I’ve written the questions from Mikel below, along with my answers. How do you get student to explore relationships with literacy? Half the job is modeling, the other half is giving students rich literacy experiences. The real way […]

Tough Class? Use the 1st Rule of Hypnotism

On my first day as a teacher in Minneapolis, I knew that any type of professional hesitation on my part could lead to classroom management disaster, particularly since three English teachers had already quit before I was hired late in September. And despite my best effort, I was completely overrun. Here’s what the first few […]

Obama Reads Like a Writer

Obama’s summer reading list doesn’t surprise me. Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri All That Is by James Salter (Source: Entertainment Weekly) It doesn’t surprise me because […]

How Teachers and Guardians can Work Together

This morning, the entire faculty and administration of South Greenville Elementary School in sweaty North Carolina walked through the projects where most of their students live. People stepped out onto religiously trimmed lawns to wave and smile. “What are y’all doing here?” shouted one parent. “Visiting,” a teacher hollered back. In fact, the school personnel […]

10 Classroom Door Quotes

A classroom door is a portal from the hallway to a consciousness of your choosing. Here are 10 quotations to make it count.10. “Life is a song – sing it. Life is a game – play it. Life is a challenge – meet it. Life is a dream – realize it. Life is a sacrifice […]

20 Teacher Humblebrags

1. Too bad the kids act up in all the other classes. They never cause me trouble. 2. They thought I was out of touch—right up until I mentioned listening to Tame Impala on Beats 1. 3. They applauded so loud after the PowerPoint that the teacher next door complained about the noise. 4. […]

My Favorite MLK Photo

Photo credit: Bob Fitch, a staff photographer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) , Montgomery, Alabama airport, 1966 In 1995, I found this photo in a display in the Chicago airport after an interview for an English Education Professor job at the University of Georgia. The whole interview went south after one of the […]