Whole Brain Teaching National Conference

This is my first official entry for a public blog.  These early posts will chronicle my emerging study and implementation of whole brain teaching.  My role as a professor of education includes modeling effective teaching methods for the graduate student in my classes.  One of those students introduced Whole Brain Teaching and Chris Biffle's work to me in late March.  Other students expressed an interest in learning more about WBT and how to implement it in their classrooms.

Today, I am a new learner and a veteran teacher.  That will be my focus for upcoming posts.  I am learning to use WBT in my teaching while teaching graduate students how to plan to implement WBT in their classrooms this fall.  It has been very exciting.

Walsh University agreed to let me attend the Whole Brain Teaching National Conference at Louisiana College, Pineville, LA in mid-June.  Simply, WBT is the most active teaching technique I have ever seen. Chris Biffle's presentation style, which is to teach whole brain teaching by doing whole brain teaching, kept everyone rocking and rolling for the entire conference.

Classroom application for educators, regardless of the level,  is clearly effective.  The process is engaging and emphasizes students using active, whole brain activity to learn new information.  Some of the teachers new to the process fear doing the techniques "all the time."  That type of thinking is more limited than it needs to be.

Like any effective method, WBT needs to be varied.  The classroom management and student engagement activities are pretty straight forward and easy to grasp.  I believe our preservice and master's students could benefit from exposure to Whole Brain Teaching strategies.

There is a strong relationship between Whole Brian Teaching and cooperative learning.  For a teacher who currently understands and practices cooperative learning, he/she could make a very smooth transition to implementing strategies from Whole Brain Teaching.

Regarding the last day of the conference, if I was to describe what makes whole brain teaching different from other active learning strategies I would use the word "revolutionary."  WBT is so different from anything I have observed in a classroom (and I have observed over 500 teachers in the past 18 years).  The only time I have witnessed such a high level of participation has been at an athletic practice or at a marching band rehearsal.  

Here is to helping our students get more from our efforts than we may think is possible.