Teaching With the Brain in Mind

ask the question, “What do kids experience and
what is threatening to them?” As a result, it’s quite
exciting to see the elimination of threat in practice.
You might want to get your staff together and
brainstorm factors that might contribute to threat
and high stress. Some of the likely sources are
threatening comments, “score keeping” discipline
strategies, sarcasm, unannounced “pop” quizzes, a
lack of resources, unforgiving deadlines, and cultural
or language barriers.
Create “emotional bridges” from students’
worlds outside the classroom to the start of learning.
Make the assumption (even though it won’t
always be true) that your students need transition
time from their personal lives to the their academic
lives and from one teacher to the next. You never
know what happens out in the hallways. At the
start of class, students could still be reeling from
an insult, a break-up with a close friend, a fight, or
the loss of something valuable. Using dependable
activities that trigger specific, predictable states can
be the perfect way to bridge into learning. Appropriate
rituals keep the stress levels low and can
even eliminate threat responses.
For example, each morning at SuperCamp
starts with “getting ready to learn” time. These predictable,
safe rituals include a morning walk with a
partner, time with teammates to discuss personal
problems, reviewing the previous day’s learning,
and stretching during morning physical activity.
Such built-in transitions allow for the brain to
change to the right chemical state needed for
learning. It also allows everyone to “synchronize”
their clocks to the same learning time. Follow-up
studies indicate that this threat-reducing process
works (DePorter and Hernacki 1992).
During the day at SuperCamp, high levels of
novelty, movement, and choice enrich a highly rel-
69
Motivation and Rewards
evant curriculum (how to run your own brain,
problem solving, conflict resolution, and learning
to learn). The end of the day follows the same routine
as the start, almost in reverse. Closure rituals
help students put learning from the day in its new
cognitive-emotional place.
You might consider arrival and beginning rituals
that include music fanfare, positive greetings,
special handshakes, hugs, or sharing time. Certain
songs can be used to bring students back from a
break and let them know it’s time to start up.
(Music sure beats a bell!) Group and organizational
rituals also help, such as team names, cheers, gestures,
and games. Successful situational rituals
include applause when learners contribute, a song
to close or end something, affirmations, discussion,
journal writing, cheers, self-assessment, and gestures.
These opportunities to influence the affective
side of learning make a strong case for longer
teaching blocks at the secondary level. This way, a
teacher can practice some of these strategies and
still have adequate time for content.
The SuperCamp environment provides extensive
opportunities for students to get personal and
academic feedback. Students usually get this feedback
10 to 20 times a day though the purposeful
use of sharing time, goal setting, group work,
question-and-answer time, observation of others,
and journals. Teachers who specifically design their
learning to have dozens of methods of learnergenerated
feedback—not one or two—find that
motivation soars. Peer feedback is more motivating
and useful than teacher feedback in getting lasting
results (Druckman and Sweets 1988).
The whole issue of learned helplessness is
dealt with at SuperCamp in a dramatic way. Studies
indicate that the best way to treat the condition
is to use multiple trials of compelling or “forced”