Becoming a Wiz at Brain Based Teaching

I enjoyed the activities this group presented, such as the right and left brain quiz and the folder activity. I also liked some of the sites that were on the wiki (by the way, nice job creating a wiki). I saved the links so that I can continue to go back and read the sites; my favorites were "Top 10 Tips for Classroom Discipline and Management," the "Wicked Witch" site, and "Classroom Environment: the basics." Marilee Sprenger's steps to turn sensory memory into long term memory and the focus time and processing information was very interesting - I may have to print this out!

I appreciate the suggestion of journaling. Many teachers stop this in elementary school, but I feel it can be helpful to any teacher and student at any grade level, as long as it is done correctly. I want to make note that I agree, rituals are so important! Not many people like it when they are expecting one thing and they get something else - I think as educators we need to keep this in mind because it really does have an effect on our students.

I would have liked to see more movement, the presentation was quite long and at times hard to sit through. When talking about exercise and movement in the classroom, it would have been nice to get up and try out some stretching techniques. Also, I feel the presentation was long because it seemed more of a lecture presentation and not an active presentation. The best way to teach someone something is to model and I know I would have taken more away from the presentation if I had been involved or had seen how to use this book in my classroom.

This is a hard habit to break, and I find myself doing it a lot too - but please keep the "you need to do this" or "it's better if you...." to a minimum -- all I seemed to hear was "you." At times I felt like I was being attacked (goes with the lecturing aspect), and I felt like I needed to defend the way I do things.