Brain-based learning

My lesson design is based on helping students develop their pre frontal cortex. This area of the brain utilizes decision making, planning, and social interactions. In order to help improve this area, I make lessons that have students work in groups where they must make decisions to solve problems or develop strategies for a game. Students must plan to solve objectives, and students have to be able to interact with one another to complete the activities. During lecture we discussed good chemicals in the brain. Dopamine is one of those good chemicals. Dopamine helps information flow to higher levels of the brain. Some strategies to help boost dopamine are achieving challenges, physical activity, kindness, interacting well with peers. My lessons are designed to incorporate all of these strategies. Since it is a PE class, physical activity is very important. Lectures and instruction time are limited so that students have the optimal amount of time for learning and being physically active. My lessons provide students with progressions. Each progression adds more difficulty to them. This provides challenges for the students. Kindness and interacting well with peers go hand in hand. Teamwork is very important in physical education. I emphasize respect and providing affirmations to one another, which promotes a positive and safe learning environment. Lessons are designed to have students engage in team building activities. Also, respect and affirmations are built and emphasized in every lesson. My overall lessons are designed to access memory lanes through procedural and emotional memory. When a skill in physical education it is important to provide numerous repetitions. This allows the students to become more proficient at the skill. Each lesson has a lot of movement involved, which helps procedural memory. For emotional memory, I add music into the lessons. I will let students bring in their own head phones that they can listen to. I also bring in a lot of enthusiasm. One of my students always comments about how she has never seen any as excited as I am about PE. So, I know my students see my enthusiasm. According to the power point, a student's brain grows through active participation, physical activity, and repetition in a variety of ways. As you can see from the examples provided, I implement all of those in my lessons to help students learn. Students are actively engaged in the learning. As mentioned early, 90% of class time is dedicated for students to be engaged in activities that help them learn a variety of skills. Students begin in simple drills to start learning a skill, and then students are progressed in more challenging activities where they can apply the skill in game-like situations. It does no good in physical education to lecture about how to perform a skill. In order to learn the skill, students must practice it, and must be able to have enough time to get plenty of practice.