#003 - How Teachers Can Revolutionize Classroom Engagement 🍎💡

Welcome to Neuroeducation, where we're exploring the neuroscience of how to switch on the brain to supercharge learning. I'll be sharing with you innovative teaching techniques, effective parenting strategies, and educational advocacy. I'm your host, Angie Dee. Together, let's revolutionize children's learning. Hi everybody and welcome back to Neuroeducation. Thank you for being here. We are going to touch on something super exciting today. How to switch on

the brain to supercharge learning. Unfortunately, what's happened in schools is that we have continued a very outdated method of education. If we look back to where schools were created, we know that post-war we needed to get a lot of children into schools and basically it was the easiest thing to get them into a box, behind a table, on a chair, writing out something on a sheet, textbook learning. And today we've added a thousand tests to that. So often,

not only are they teaching to the test, we're still teaching in a very outdated method of education. What does neuroscience say about how we teach right now in this day and age? A lot of people say to me, yes, but we're innovating, Ang. Look what we've got. We've got laptops

in all of the classrooms. Well, while laptops obviously is an innovation in some form, when you're getting them to type, and in a form where they're having to respond to a question that's still requiring very lower order kind of lower order thinking, it's still that very same outdated method of education just on a laptop. So what can we do to really switch on the brain to supercharge learning? There's quite a few things that we have learned through neuroscience. I

mean, we can literally put little monitors on the brain. We have incredible research that show what kind of hormones charge the brain so that it is ready for learning and more receptive and remembers more of what it's learned. And we know that when children are interested and children are engaged, the hormones of serotonin and dopamine are flooding the brain at different times. Are they connected?

Are they interested? If they're connected to their teacher and to their classmates and they're engaged in some kind of classroom discussion and they're engaged in the learning, the quality of learning is going to be so much higher. So I'm going to give you three principles that neuroscience has shown very clearly switch on the brain and can supercharge learning. The first principle is

emotional receptivity. Now we know that if our brain is in fight, flight, freeze or faint, some people call it fawn, then their learning is basically at the lowest possible power because if the brain feels like they are in danger in any way shape or form and that can be from obviously an obvious threat like somebody's actually trying to hurt them or in this day and age a lot of our threats are psychological maybe bullying or maybe they're

not feeling like they're being supported by you know their teacher or their peers what can happen if they're in fight, flight or freeze, their actual learning power, which is in our prefrontal cortex at the front of our brain, it can't be activated. It's like all powers are at

survival. So what can we do to make sure Well, first of all, the brain can be activated for higher order thinking and be in the prefrontal cortex is making sure children feel safe and connected. So number one, and they've shown it in many studies, the connection to the teacher is of a higher influence than many other things in the classroom. If you are spending time connecting to the students before they

come into the classroom, that is fantastic. A lot of teachers I see these days, they have five different ways to connect before they even enter the classroom. A high five, an elbow pump, maybe a dance, something fun, but it's just a simple way to connect to the students before they come into the classroom. Also, what kind of an environment is the classroom, I guess, feeling in terms of are they feeling supportive by their classmates? Is it a comfortable environment or

is it an environment with lots of competition or bullying? So what can we do to create that kind of environment where they're feeling comfortable? Obviously having things like group discussions, group projects, working in pairs, talking about different things, this helps children

feel a sense of connection. So not only does it make them feel safer, that allows the thinking and all of the powers to go up to the prefrontal cortex, but also educational research has shown us that children can remember about 5% of what they hear, but 50% of what they've learned through classroom discussions and group discussions. So not only is it an effective way to help switch on the brain for prefrontal cortex for the higher order thinking, it's also a fantastic way for them to actually be

learning the content. The second component of how to switch on the brain to supercharged learning is engaging children's interest. Sometimes we might say something like, all right today we're learning about photosynthesis. If you are just stating what you're learning and

the children often will react with receptivity that dwindles because you're just telling this is what we're doing today, here's our content, da da da da da. It's very different if we even try to elicit a little bit of interest from the children. You could start with a question, an open-ended question. So why is the grass green? Why are the leaves on the trees green? And why do the leaves on

the tree change colour as we go through the seasons? just starting with a slightly different question can start to elicit interest. Also, if we're following children's interests or allowing children more choice in their interests, maybe if we're studying different countries, what kind of aspects of understanding another country or culture can benefit them in their classroom? And what kind of choice can you give them to see what aspect are they interested in? What country are they interested in

learning? these little little inputs where we give children more and more power to follow their interests increases the level of serotonin. Now when we increase the level of serotonin our happy hormone in our brain What happens to the learning? The learning is supercharged. I like the analogy of a little paper boat going down a stream because we have our neurons that are basically firing together to wire together. But the more happy hormones we have, the more happy and interested the

children are in the learning. If you imagine the paper boat, the message of whatever the learning content is going down a stream. If the children aren't engaged and they're not interested, that paper boat is probably going down a little rocky, bumpy stream that has barely any water. As soon as we increase the engagement and we increase the interest, that paper boat is going to go down a stream that has water rushing

down it. And that is the same for us as adults. If you can think of something that you've learned as an adult, something that you've been interested in, maybe listening to a podcast, maybe reading a book, doing your own research, how much of you have retained of that information? I would say a

lot more information. And neuroscience backs that when we're interested, we're engaged and where we have some choice in that learning, we're going to remember it for a long time. And that's about lifelong learning. The third element I wanted to share with you today is about choice. Now, when we add choice There have been some studies to show that it improves learning up to 30%. There are lots of elements that we can add choice, just like I mentioned before.

What country did they want to study? Or maybe how did they want to present the information? If you are having to present the information on, let's say, a country. Can you share something in a poem? Can you share it as a diorama? Can you share it in a song? Are there points that they need to cover in whatever form it is? Can they be given more creative freedom in how to share that information and that choice of that learning? The next element is

hands-on learning. And this is basically something that improves all of those three elements. The emotional receptivity, the interest that the children have and the choice. When we bring hands-on learning to all of those elements, learning improves dramatically. they have shown that the hands are literally a pipeline to the brain. And if you have hands-on learning versus a sterile worksheet where children are writing down answers, the learning

difference and the retention is dramatic. Neuroscience is clear about this subject. When you engage a hands-on learning experience to any area of learning, the learning improves exponentially. So what we have shown in a diagram represents how much learning the senses take up in the brain. Once again, our eyes, what we see

and what we hear, Really, we retain such a small amount. The learning pyramid reflects some of the research. It shows we might retain five to 10% of what we see and what we hear. And the classroom discussions take it up to 50%. However, our hands-on learning takes some of that learning retention up to 75%. So not only as a teacher or a parent would you be improving your learning sevenfold by increasing some hands-on learning, but you're making it more enjoyable for yourself and for the

students. When we add one other special area to this It's the top of the pyramid and it's not what a lot of people think. Peer teaching tops the learning pyramid out of any method that we can teach, whether it's audio, visual, classroom discussions, even hands-on learning. Peer teaching tops the learning pyramid at 90% retention. Why

is this? We're social animals, we're social beings, so when we're able to teach something to somebody else, not only are we enjoying that component of social, of being able to be social, also we're having to think

about everything we've learned and then share it. So engaging peer teaching in classrooms is a really effective method of education that lots of schools are using because it's wonderful to show children that maybe somebody excels in spelling but somebody else is excelling in maths, maybe someone's brilliant at the arts and in each subject you can allow some of those children that might shine and do a little bit better in those subjects to help some of the other children and show that

we can all help each other because we all have different strengths and this comes back to also showing our children that they all have different strengths and talents in all different areas of education. Thank you again, I hope you really enjoyed that episode

and I hope to see you again for our next episode of Neuroeducation. To help our podcast, what you can do is give us a big review on Apple Podcasts, also on Spotify and subscribe to our YouTube channel. All the links will be down below. Thank you so much for joining us