Whether you are a teacher delivering instructions to students or a student attempting to retain information for a class, there are 20 cross-curricular strategies that take advantage of the way all brains learn best. They are as follows:
Brainstorming and Discussion: We remember what we talk about with others.
Drawing and Artwork: Drawing helps students encode new content for later recall.
Field Trips: We remember where we go in the real world.
Games: When playing a game, the stress level goes down and the retention rate goes up.
Graphic Organizers, Semantic Maps, and Word Webs: Having students design a mind map addresses both hemispheres of the brain.
Humor: He who laughs most, learns best. – John Cleese
Manipulatives, Experiments, Labs, and Models: There is a strong correlation between what our hands hold and what our minds comprehend.
Metaphors, Analogies, and Similes: Take what is unfamiliar to students and connect it to what is familiar and they will get it.
Mnemonic Devices: Acronyms and acrostics enable students to memorize lists of items.
Movement: Anything the brain learns while the body is in motion is long remembered.
Music, Rhythm, Rhyme, and Rap: Nursery rhymes and song lyrics learned while we are children are easily remembered as adults.
Project-Based and Problem-Based learning: When students are completing real-world projects or solving real-world problems, comprehension is facilitated.
Reciprocal Teaching and Cooperative Learning: We remember 90% of what we teach to someone else.
Roleplay: Involve me, I understand. Chinese Proverb
Storytelling: The brain remembers stories because they are connected together with a beginning, middle, and end.
Technology: Technology is a workplace competency which enables students to be college – or career – ready.
Visualization and Guided Imagery: Everything happens twice: once in the mind and once in reality. – Stephen Covey
Visuals: Show me, I remember. – Chinese Proverb
Work-Study and Apprenticeships: On the job training helps the content make sense.
Writing and Journals: The brain remembers what we write in long hand better than what we type on a computer.
Consult my bestseller, Worksheets Don’t Grow Dendrites: 20 Instructional Strategies that Engage the Brain (Corwin Press), for 200 pieces of research and more than 150 instructional activities in support of the 20 strategies. Increase student achievement, decrease behavior problems, and make teaching and learning so much fun!