Designing Brain Compatible Learning

Catherine shared this text resource, Designing Brain-Compatible Learning, 3rd Edition by Gayle H. Gregory and Terence Parry, with me.  It has a lot of great ideas for differentiated instruction and planning.  One of my favourites is "Six Hat Thinking" - blue hat thinkers draw conclusions from material; green hat thinkers use the topic or material as a springboard for creative adaptations, options, and alternatives; red hat thinkers deal with the hunches, intuitions, emotions and feelings about a topic; purple hat thinkers focus on the negative aspects; yellow hat thinkers look for all the positive aspects; white hat thinkers look for hard facts, figures, and data.  You can have 6 different groups looking for different aspects of the same material.  Then discuss what each group thought of the material.

A small portion of the book is posted on the publisher's website.  Here's the link:  Sage Publishing - Designing Brain Compatible Learning.  Below are a few of the pages the publisher has posted.  Here's the table of contents:

The book is the size of 8.5x11 paper, and has some useful blackline masters to copy for planning and classroom activities.  This page below shares some classroom strategies for accessing different parts of our memory processing systems.

The book also describes which kinds of memories are useful for different tasks.  This page describes emotional memories and then lists instructional strategies for accessing particular memory pathways.