Brain+Compatible+Strategies



The brain-based approach to learning is based on work from cognitive psychology and both educational and neurophysiological research. It stresses the importance of developing an awareness and understanding of how students learn so that instructors can design teaching approaches conducive to the brain's natural abilities in order to promote student learning and achievement. This approach leads to an understaind of how students store, sort, and retrieve information.

**12 Principles of Brain Compatible Learning**

 * 1) The brain is a parallel processor.
 * 2) Learning engages the entire physiology.
 * 3) The search for meaning is innate.
 * 4) The search for meaning occurs through patterning.
 * 5) Emotions are critical to patterning.
 * 6) The brain processes parts and wholes simultaneously.
 * 7) Learning involves both focused attention and peripheral perception.
 * 8) Learning always involves conscious and unconscious processes.
 * 9) We have at least two different types of memory.
 * 10) We understand and remember best when facts and skills are embedded in natural, spatial memory.
 * 11) Learning is enhanced by challenge and inhibited by threat.
 * 12) Each brain is unique.

// *Brain-based learning information provided by Sue Yamin // The **12 brain/mind learning principles** were first published in **//Educational Leadership//** in 1989 to explain how people learn naturally. They provided the foundations for what was called brain based learning.

<span style="display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; text-align: left;">We now call them systems principles of natural learning. They are based on the fact that natural learning is biological as well as psychological, and that every aspect of a human being - including body, emotions, mind, social relationships and physical context is involved in learning. The principles were developed by synthesizing and integrating research from many different disciplines, ranging from neuroscience to cognitive psychology.

<span style="display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; text-align: left;">They show that there are acutally several different types of learning, and different types of learning outcomes. There are differences, for instance, between: <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; text-align: left;"> <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; text-align: left;"> <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; text-align: left;">
 * <span style="font-family: 'Microsoft Sans Serif',sans-serif;">rote memorization for surface knowledge;
 * <span style="font-family: 'Microsoft Sans Serif',sans-serif;">problem solving for intellectual understanding and technical/scholastic knowledge; and
 * <span style="font-family: 'Microsoft Sans Serif',sans-serif;">learning from experience that produces a "feel" for things and results in performance knowledge.

<span style="display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; text-align: left;">The principles were developed in much more detail, with implications for teaching, in the Caines' best selling book //Making Connections: Teaching and the Human Brain// (ASCD, 1991). The principles have been used extensively throughout the world, at all levels of education, ranging from the classroom to distict offices to universities to serving as foundational material for state documents.

<span style="display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; text-align: left;">The problem is that the education system pays almost no attention to how natural learning works, and so it relies on some very limited capacities (like memorization) but overlooks almost everything else that is going on in a student’s world.

<span style="display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; text-align: left;">Educators need to know how people learn naturally. Our brain/mind learning principles provide that foundation. They are true to the research while expressed in a form that is practical and easy to understand.