We’ve got friendly people and user-friendly computers. And, now, we’ve also got brain-friendly classrooms.

Soft-light lamps. Wall charts with learning concepts. Overstuffed reading chairs. Real-life objects in work centers. And lots of plants.

These are more than gimmicks to make students feel comfortable. They are proven ways to increase students’ interest and abilities to learn. They also are practices in what is known as Concept-Based Brain Compatible (CBBC) Classrooms in the Davenport Community Schools.

Brain-Friendly is another way of referring to these classrooms, which appear and feel different from traditional classrooms. They provide the nurturing kind of environment in which students’ brains are able to work better.

Based in research on how the brain works, this new teaching approach includes the following eight components:

• Absence of Threat – with teachers helping to alleviate threats or anxiety by making daily schedules and expectations clear and emphasizing the district’s Skills for Life
• Collaboration – involving community building between students
• Enriched Environment – including plants, lamps, hands-on activities, and community guest speakers
• Adequate Time – providing students with the time necessary to discover patterns and connections in what they are learning
• Choice – allowing students to select how they learn, when possible
• Meaningful Content – presented at a difficulty level that matches the students’ age levels and is relevant to their world beyond school
• Immediate Feedback – so students continually know where they stand in order to make improvements
• Mastery of Student Learning – demonstrated in a variety of ways that allow students to see their progress

What Does a ‘Brain-Compatible’ Classroom Look Like?: Instructional Strategies

Absence of Threat

• Daily Agendas: schedule (expectations) for the day posted where students can see it easily
• Lifelong Guidelines: Be Truthful, Be Trustworthy, No Put Downs, Active Listening, Personal Best
• Procedures: steps for completing a task – the plan for expected behavior
• Consistency: expectations maintained through procedures, agendas, modeling, and consequences
• Target Talk: a non-threatening way to focus attention on a concept or behavior
• Davenport’s Seven Skills: caring, teamwork, responsibility, effort, initiative, perseverance, common sense
• Brain Biology: teaching how the brain functions

Collaboration

• Cooperative Groups: working together to complete a task
• Class Meetings: time to "talk it out" and discuss issues and resolve problems
• Community Building: helping each student become a contributing part of his or her class

Enriched Environment

• "Being There" Experiences: real world location that uses all the learner’s senses
• Clutter-Free Environment: classrooms that avoid distraction and overstimulation and are clean and well organized
• Morning Procedure: a procedure that sets the stage for the student to begin his or her own work (the day begins with student, not teacher)
• Immersion in Content: creating a time and place within the classroom that reflects what is being studied – not just print resources, but also three-dimension objects and artifacts
• Compatible Colors: greens and blues tend to be calming and shades of brown reassuring; bright psychedelic colors are avoided
• Hands-On Activities: artifacts, manipulatives, "real" objects
• Emotional Hooks: ways of bringing in interest and experiences of the students; emotion drives attention, which drives learning
• Resource Books and People: original documents, guests from a particular field of study
• Music, Lamps, Plants, Potpourri: an environment conducive to learning

Immediate Feedback

• Guided Practice: teacher provides sufficient examples and practice for student achievement
• Rubric: a scoring guide that gives the child the expectations and a vehicle for self-feedback
• Student Binders: binders for self-checking progress and understanding
• Checking for Understanding: teacher monitors through observation, informal assessment, and every-pupil response techniques

Meaningful Content

• Application to the Real World: constantly helping students connect what is being learned to how it will be used in the world beyond school
• Curriculum Connections: concepts that can be applied to other subject areas
• Student Binders: notebooks or folders for each student that contain copies of procedures, work-in-progress, Seven Skills, Lifelong Guidelines, classroom information, expectations
• C.U.E.: design content that is creative, useful, and emotional
• Age Appropriate Content: content that is meaningful and of interest to the learner
• Critical Content: facts; what instructors want students to know and when they’re going to do with it
• Theme: a framework for organizing the curriculum; a cognitive structure

Choice/Multiple Intelligences

• Learning Activities: activities designed to help students build mental programs
• Eight Intelligences: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial-visual, musical-rhythmic, naturalist, intrapersonal, interpersonal, bodily-kinesthetic
• Time: giving students some choice in how to organize their time
• Science Behaviors: observing, comparing, organizing, applying, and communicating
• Learning Styles: visual, auditory, tactile, kinesthetic
• Bloom’s Taxonomy: knowledge->comprehension->application->analysis->evaluation->synthesis

Adequate Time

• Pattern Recognition: helping students see patterns in the world, across subject areas and in content and process skills – concepts and generalizations
• Building Mental Programs: being able to do a sequence of steps to accomplish a goal
• Less Is Best: developing content and topics to the concept level; not skimming over the curriculum

Mastery

• Student Portfolio: demonstrates growth, polished pieces, personal best
• Metacognition: teaching students how to think about their thinking
• 3C’s of Assessment: complete, correct, and comprehensive
• Authentic Assessment: tasks are related to classroom instruction and connected to the world beyond the classroom
• Closures (celebration): students teaching parents or other adults what they’ve learned as a result of a unit of study