Recently, I’ve referenced “The Nun Study” in my seminars when discussing the importance of challenging our brains to grow neural connections. Many have not heard of this study. So, in order to facilitate further discussion and learning on the topic, I’m posting some links here.

The Nun Study at the University of Minnesota where the research is headquartered.

Time magazine wrote an excellent article on The Nun Study in 2001. A quote from that article “…a college education and an active intellectual life, on the other hand, may actually protect you from the effects of the disease. Perhaps the most surprising result of the Nun Study, though, is the discovery that the way we express ourselves in language, even at an early age, can foretell how long we’ll live and how vulnerable we’ll be to Alzheimer’s decades down the line.”

The University of Kentucky also published an outstanding article on the topic of Aging and Alzheimer’s.

I read this article and remember how sharp my dad was at 78 years old. He did a crossword puzzle every day, spoke two languages fluently and was an avid reader. He was sharp until the day he passed over.

Seems to me that it’s a gift to our students to teach them to love reading, writing and on-going learning.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

As teachers working in the trenches, we don’t often have the opportunity to step back and evaluate our performance, come up with new strategies to help students, or receive honest feedback on our work in the classroom. Sometimes the only feedback we get is based on standardized test scores or exam grades.

Imagine if you were armed with effective strategies for inclusion, memorization, and engaging students before your first day in the classroom.  These education majors from Carroll University had the opportunity to attend one of my seminars as part of their preparation for going into the classroom. Melissa and Whitney learned a wide range of strategies for teaching in a short period of time – even admitting they may use some of the memorization tips at the college level!

By exposing tomorrow’s teachers to strategies for success before they enter the classroom, we’re improving the quality of teaching in our schools and the chance for our students to thrive.

As Mr. Pettingill and Mr. Wymore discuss in the video, learning can go high-tech by using ELMOs, or completely “no-tech” with an activity as simple as doodling.

Since both gentlemen teach art classes, they find the use of ELMOs (Electronic Light-Modulated Overheads) helpful in allowing students to show their artwork to the class. By placing the artwork on a TV screen – removing it from the students’ hands and giving them a different perspective – it allows the “artist” to see his or her work more objectively, offering the opportunity for self analysis. The students have the opportunity to explain their work, while the class is invited to provide constructive criticism.

As I was talking about this with the teachers, I noticed that one teacher had drawn my portrait while I made my presentation. As a visual learner, doodling while I was speaking helped him link the content I was presenting with a visual reminder of the seminar. He could revisit this sketch at a later time, helping him recall the material we’d learned by linking the drawing with his “verbal memory” that came from listening.

As teachers, we often assume that doodling in class is “bad,” indicating that students aren’t listening to the material being taught. However, for visual learners, doodling can be that extra nudge that helps them in memorizing the material. Try this: let the doodlers in your class know that it’s OK to draw in their notebooks – but only if their doodles are related to the material being presented. After a period of time, do a “notebook check” – ask them what different drawings mean, or what was being taught when they created the doodle.

By taking what can be seen as a negative and turning it around into a positive, you can not only gain the trust of your students – but, by working with the students’ strengths, you can enhance learning and memory on multiple levels. Create a win-win situation!

One of my favorite phrases is “Draw it so you know it!” I believe this is one of the most powerful ways we can help our students remember their lessons. If we can engage more of the brain in learning we can help the lesson “stick” much more effectively.

Drawing activates parts of the brain that wouldn’t necessarily be engaged if, for example, students were just taking notes based on a lecture. Drawing ensures students immerse themselves in the material. Kids don’t have to be great artists to draw – what’s important is that they try, even if it’s just with stick figures!

Drawing using adding machine tape takes the concept of “Draw it so you know it” one step further by having students create a series of drawings in a logical sequence. This sequence could be the stages in a process, a chronological account of events in a story, or the steps for solving a problem. The important part is that students are drawing items in order – so they’re not only thinking about how best to represent the steps, but putting them in the proper order.

Keeping these drawings in their organizers helps students match up the pictures with the words and provides a powerful study tool.

Use two-column pages and split the rules for clarity. Label one column “If” and the other column “Then.” For example, in the If column, we might say, “I before E”, while the Then column would say, “Except after C”. You can do this for most subject areas.

Applying rules is a fairly simple strategy, as long as the rule is clear. For example, some of us learned the months of the year with a rhyme and some of us learned a physical rule using our knuckles. These are memory strategies focused on rules that we have used all our lives, and still use.

Using a rulebook helps students remember key facts the same way that a rhyme or other method does,but may help students that do not find other methods helpful.

Have you ever taught a student who could memorize their spelling words for a test, but couldn’t spell the same words correctly while writing an essay?  Or seen a student searching fervently for an answer, only to forget the question you asked? Both of these students were experiencing a problem with their working memory, or the place in the brain where connections between short-term and long-term memory are made. If a student’s working memory becomes too full, it lets go of earlier information to process incoming information.  This is what happened to the student searching for an answer, taking in lots of information in his or her search, and then forgetting the question. Understanding active working memory is very important when working with struggling learners and students with learning disabilities. Learning to differentiate our instruction so our teaching techniques support working memory and our interventions are appropriate is critical when considering RTI responses. Active working memory accomplishes four tasks:

1. Provides a “mind space” to combine or develop ideas
2. Holds together the parts of a task while doing it
3. Provides a “meeting place” for short-term and long-term memory to “network”
4. Offers a place for multiple immediate plans and intentions

Working memory is where all the parts of a process are held together. When you’re planning a vacation, working memory is where the reminders to rent a car, make flight reservations, and find a hotel are all kept. Working memory is where everything goes before it gets moved to long-term memory.  It’s what you’re using right now as you read and process this information.

When working with students, especially those with a learning disability or who are simply struggling in a particular subject area, it is also important to understand how stress affects working memory. When the brain is stressed – when it’s in ‘fight or flight’ mode – chemicals are released in the brain that alert the body to get ready to defend itself.

Unfortunately however, the brain doesn’t know the difference between a piece of paper with a test on it and a charging tiger. When the brain feels threatened, it reacts by releasing the ‘fight or flight’ chemicals. Those chemicals shut down working memory, and the information we were working with is gone. One of these ‘fight or flight’ chemicals, cortisol, can seriously impact working memory. It shuts down memory and can even permanently impair memory over time.

Experts believe that too much stress is harmful to our memory because it can cause too much cortisol to be released into our system. When we have students who have demonstrated that they know information but can’t remember it on a test, it’s likely that their active working memory has shut down. Once we understand how working memory works, and how a stressful situation, such as taking a test, can impair that memory, we can take steps to help students’ working memories perform better.

For example, while we would not want students to use a calculator during a test to see if they have memorized their multiplications tables, a calculator would be appropriate to use during an algebra test.  This is because when solving a higher-level process, a calculator allows students to think at that higher level more successfully since their working memory is not busy trying to remember that 5 X 9 = 45.

Does anyone have an idea as to how I might ‘get the word out’ about this valuable resource for Spanish speaking parents and caregivers? I’d appreciate suggestions.

Thanks,

Susan Fitzell

No matter what subject you teach, using singing and music to help students remember material can be one of the most powerful tools in your teaching toolkit. Math teachers use “Pop! Goes the Weasel” to help students remember the quadratic formula. English teachers use “Mary Had a Little Lamb” to teach the various forms of ‘to be.’ And in Social Studies…well, let’s look at an example. I was recently talking about memorization with my kung fu teacher, who’s a few years younger than me, and he had a great story about using music as a memory strategy. When he was in high school, he had a tough assignment – to memorize the Constitution. He studied it every night, but just couldn’t seem to get it into his head.

One day, he was talking about this assignment at lunch, when a girl jumped in and asked him if he’d tried using the song. It turned out that she’d seen Schoolhouse Rock on a Saturday morning cartoon, and the show had a song for the Constitution. Soon word got out to all the students in the class about the song from Schoolhouse Rock – and all of the students passed the assignment. The teacher was flabbergasted – he’d never seen a class where every student was able to memorize the Constitution. The funniest thing to me was when my kung fu teacher started singing the song on the spot; 20 years later, he still remembered it. Talk about learning!

As teachers, we absolutely must use every tool we have available to us, and music is one of the most powerful strategies we can utilize. You don’t have to be a Broadway star to help your students use music and singing in the classroom. Whether you teach them a song for the multiplication tables or have them make up lyrics for karaoke that are relevant to your unit, by attaching something new to something the kids already know, they’ll learn.

Jan teaches GED courses for adults at a local community college. In her first class after attending the seminar, she was planning on starting a new unit on Social Studies. “One of the things I’m hoping to start right away is to have the students work together to create some of their own mnemonic techniques,” she told me. Laughing, she commented that “I think [the students] are going to enjoy that more than always listening to me!”

Most of the time, when we consider techniques and strategies for the classroom, we think in terms of elementary, middle, and high school. But these strategies can be used anywhere learning takes place, including at the college level – and even in the corporate world, where “students” go through workplace training and continuing education.

1. In social studies, history, or Government, hold a Party Convention to teach the principles of the democratic process. One teacher in Nebraska organizes a party convention with affiliation to any major party, and then breaks his class up into as many two or three student state delegations as possible. After appointing one student as “the candidate,” students research their state and attend the convention as delegates of their state.

2. Another social studies or history example is to reenact major events, such as the Battle of Bunker Hill, or the Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. As the teacher, you might dress up and set the stage before acting such things out yourself, or you might engage the class more deeply by including them in the process.

3. Math and science concepts lend themselves well to music. Put your students into groups and have them create a song or rap to help remember the concept being discussed. I’ve talked repeatedly about the value of music in remembering information and this strategy bears inclusion again here. Bringing students into the process and allowing them to use music they love motivates them to participate and remember. There are a variety of resources available on my website, but a new resource I discovered recently is http://mrduey.com. Another teacher tuning their love of music to the subjects they teach.

4. Teachers have been using animals like fish, reptiles, and amphibians in the classroom for years to teach students about life-cycle, habitat, and responsibility. The problem with this idea is that, over time, the process becomes more chore than treat for students. Another approach, and something that many communities offer, might be to have service animals brought in during specific days or times. These animals are specially trained for a variety of tasks and service organizations are always on the lookout for ways to help train these animals by offering them opportunities to interact with others. This is an especially good activity for involving students with special needs and can be adapted to a variety of subject areas.

5. Having a cook-off or using food examples is an excellent way for students to apply concepts like fractions, U.S to metric conversions, geometry. Teach fractions using a pizza or cake. Show how a sandwich is a square until you cut it in half and it becomes two triangles.

6. One life skills activity that reaches students can be applied to a variety of teaching moments. Give students an ‘entertainment budget’ and have them use their ‘money’ to purchase a new gaming system with games and extras. Make the budget small enough to be challenging. Many students have no concept of the skills involved in managing money, but they will apply critical thinking to the mathematics with this sort of challenge activity.

7. Hold a mock trial with lawyers, a judge, etc. to examine the judicial process, act out current or historical events, or to deter students from making poor life decision. Many high school criminal justice courses use this activity, sometimes including field trips to actual courtrooms, but the idea can be applied to a number of other courses and ideas as well.