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All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.Copyright © 2011, Lorenz Educational Press

ISBN 978-1-4291-2279-5

for other LEP products visit our websitewww.LorenzEducationalPress.com

P.O. Box 802 • Dayton, OH 45401-0802

Instructional Planning with the Brain in Mind

by Dr. Linda Karges-BoneEdited by Bonnie KruegerCover and Book Design by Kati Baker

FramingBrain

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DEDICATION

This book is for Gary, my partner in life, adventure, and marriage. Celebrating 30 years together in 2010 – we kept our focus.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

With grateful acknowledgement to the Warren, PA Brain Team and the Hursey Elementary School teachers in Charleston, SC

Your good energy in 2010 became the catalyst for this book. The entire faculty at each site deserves credit, but without the attention of the following master teachers,

this book would be less rich:

Grace Backstrom, Jenn Dilks, Lisa Franklin, Rosemarie Green, Stacey Ludwig, Caren Pence, and Janet Petersonand

LaDene Conroy and Tamra Setzer

SPECIAL THANKS TO

Heather Bealer, Jenna Branch, Nicole Callahan, Kristi Latham, Laura Nelson, Alli Rhodes, Erika Rose, and Leslie Sharpe, whose work samples bring Brain Framing to life. Blessings in your new classrooms.My mother, Mary LaPorta Karges, who created a “culture of literacy” in our home.

Dr. Rick Brewer, who sent me a “brain article” every week for a year. And to “Miss Marlene” Glaser, who taught me about the “Monkey Mind” and the connection between the mindful state

and good health.

AUTHOR’S MESSAGE

I believe in Brain Framing. This is not just another “teacher-book” for trade shows, conferences, and workshops. Brain Framing is a belief system, based on scientific and medical research and developed from years of ethnographic study in classrooms. Every brain is different and has potential, but much of that potential is lost during the precious early years when neural plasticity is greatest. Much more potential is lost, I think, when teachers, whose own brains attempt to oper-ate in highly stressful situations, shut down and are unable to apply creative practices. My goal is to provide teachers with confidence and a cadre of tools and content that will allow them to remain in control, and, more than that, in creative control. Most of all, I believe that God created our human form, body, soul, and spirit to do great things, bringing Him honor. To do that, we need healthy brains, motivated students, and creative teachers.

“You made me like a handcrafted piece of pottery— What a miracle of skin and bone, muscle and brain! You gave me life itself, and incredible love. You watched and guarded every breath I took.” Job 10:8, The Message

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Table of Contents

1. The New Science of Planning ...........................................................4• Getting Started• What’s New in Brain-Based Planning?• Wiring Neurons with Innovative Instructional Planning• Brain 101 and Brain Framing• Theorists Who Inform Brain Framing• And What About Gender and Differentiation?• Art and Science in Seamless Symphony• Why Does Brain Framing Matter?• Brain Framing to Raise Test Scores• But… is it worth my time to engage in brain framing?• Red Hot Brain Spot: Framing Your Practice• Essential Questions in Review

2. Brain Framing and the Mindful Teacher ........................................20• Mindful Teachers Are Neuro-Architects• Setting Things Up• Are You a Teacher or a Neuro-Architect?• Stepping Into Lively Brain Activity• Why Eight Steps?• Using the Steps to Plan Productively• What Is YOUR Motivational Style?• Red Hot Brain Spot: Reading to Maintain a Mindful State• Essential Questions in Review

3. The Narrative : Setting the Stage for Brain Framing ...................36• Beginning the Narrative: Prior Knowledge Isn’t Enough• Step One of the Brain-Framing Narrative: Description and Analysis of

the Student Group • Step Two of the Brain-Framing Narrative: Writing Goals • Step Three of the Brain-Framing Narrative: Writing Your Rationale

Statement• Step Four of the Brain-Framing Narrative: Your Plan for Assessment• Step Five of the Brain-Framing Narrative: Your Plan for Parent Com-

munication• Step Six of the Brain-Framing Narrative: Hunting and Gathering Ahead

of Time• Wrap Up the Narrative with a Management Plan• Red Hot Brain Spot: Parent Assessment Newsletter• Essential Questions in Review

4. The Schedule: Brain-Framing Experiences Every Day .................63• The Schedule Comes After the Narrative• Brain Connection and the Schedule• Say It, Show It, Do It and the Schedule• Setting Up the Schedule• What is the Purpose of the Schedule?• Key Points for Designing the Schedule• Organizational Tips for Creating Your Schedule• Diversity and Differentiation in the Schedule• Parent Communication on the Schedule• Wrapping Up the Long-Range Plan• Let’s Practice: Templates for the LRP• Red Hot Brain Spot: Use Icons for the Schedule

5. Samples and Analysis of Primary Grade Planning ........................80• Factors Driving a Primary Grade LRP• Sample Primary Plan with Analysis• Red Hot Brain Spot: Parent Survey• Essential Questions in Review

6. Samples and Analysis of Elementary Grade Planning ................100• What Makes an Elementary LRP Special?• A Look at Brain Framing – 2nd Grade Style• Sample Brain Framing with Analysis – 3rd Grade• Rationale Statement Sample for Elementary Brain Framing• One More Look – 5th Grade Schedule-in-a-Box• Red Hot Brain Spot: Sample Learning Styles Quiz to Use with Your

Students• Essential Questions in Review

7. School-Wide Options for Planning with the Brain in Mind .......128• Rationale for a School-Wide Literacy Plan • Menu Choice One: The Brain-Literacy Campaign

o Literacy Planning Matrixo Brain-Storming Organizer to Use in Planning a Literacy

Campaigno Sample Pacing Guide with Read-Aloud Literature Embed-

ded• Menu Choice Two: Implement Brain Framing School-Wide

o Part One: The Narrativeo Part Two: The Schedule

• Red Hot Brain Spot: Brain Breaks for Every Kind of Brain• Essential Questions in Review

Bibliography ............................................................................................150Glossary ...................................................................................................151

MET

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NITION MOMENT

Look for these icons to find a Metacognition Moment or a Brain Break—stopping points to think deeply and consider key ideas, or apply a new strategy to your own practice.

Look for this icon at the end of each chapter and find Red Hot Brain Spots, quick and easy applications of the mate-rial in the chapter designed to help you put theory into practice.

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chapter one

The New Science of PlanningAs a new teacher, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on my own red, leather lesson planning book. I saw it as the Holy Grail, a sacred text that I would write each week. I’d then turn it over to the shaman of our tribe—the “AP,” or assistant principal—who would then bless the lesson plans and send me back down the hall to my classroom. It was a powerful ritual, reserved for professionals. Only certified teachers were issued lesson planning books, and I had earned that right. Now, three decades later, I realize that most of the important work of planning could not be written in little boxes on a single page. It was much more complex, demanding and metaphysical, and the last thing a truly skilled teacher does is to write. First, he or she must think very deeply, about many things, over a period of time. The new science of planning is both art and science. It draws from cognitive science and mindful spiritual practice. It is part common sense and part inspiration. It is called brain framing.

Lesson plans are only one artifact that emerges from this kind of thinking. There is so much more for a teacher to know and be able to do. Thinking about how one’s brain and mind can get inside the brain and mind of another human being, especially when that individual is young, inexperienced, and perhaps challenged by difficult life circumstances, is the subject of this book.

Getting Started

A valuable piece of art demands attention and critical perspective when framed lovingly and appropriate-ly, and so it is with the brains of students. And by “brains,” I suggest the plural on many levels. Not simply multiple brains as in number of students, but multiple types of brains, including gender, personality, effects of culture, health, and different intelligences and challenges, as defined by experts such as Gardner1 and Jensen2. Framing the brain is an art form that requires as much care as the creation of the work of art itself, and the earliest teachers, such as Socrates, acknowledged this, saying:

“I cannot teach anybody anything; I can only make them think.”

1 Gardner, Howard. Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York: Basic Books, 1993.2 Jensen, Eric. “Fragile Brains.” Educational Leadership 59, no. 3 (2001): 32-36.

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Brain Framing is a book about metacognitioni for teachers. It is a set of ideas for “thinking about thinking” in the class-room, a way to help us frame the brains of students in ways that are productive, powerful, and personal. This book will help teachers to engage brains in three fresh ways:

What is the energy behind brain framing? I suggest that it is the enormous capacity for change and possibility inherent in the sheer number of neural connections. Few have captured this critical potentiality as clearly as Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman:

If we take the pre-frontal cortex and smooth out the convolutions, it is about the size of a linen dinner napkin. But if we begin to count the synapses or neural connections at the rate of one per second, we would finish 32 million years after we began3.

Think about it – 32 million years! A fabulous testimony to the complexity and creativity of the human brain. Yet, teach-ers often find themselves at a loss to reach difficult students, and retreat from engagement saying: “I can’t get through,” or “I’ve done all I can.” How can that be if there are so many millions of possible neural pathways to stimulate and from which to coax a response? Perhaps the answer lies in giving ourselves permission to be creative and flexible in the realm of instructional planning; start planning with the brain in mind, and let the standards and curriculum follow.

3 Edelman, Gerald M. Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind. New York: Basic Books, 1993.

Framing student learning into more personalized experiences that utilize

new research on the brain, the body, and the spirit

Creating brain-friendly classroom environments

that link sensory and cognitive experiences in

ways that reduce stress for both the teacher and the

student

Organizing content into meaningful “chunks and layers” that fit into the

unique frames of students’ brains

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Brain Framing: Instructional Planning with the Brain in Mind offers a fresh look at designing instruction that is:

• gender-friendly

• integrated through a process called “chunking and layering”

• considerate of the continuum of ability levels

• aware of the role of the classroom environment

• supportive of technology infused within instruction

• tied to themes and essential questions

• linked to learning stylesiii and multiple intelligencesiv

• aware of the importance of embedding values into teaching

• designed to enhance diversity and creativity

• informed of the importance of language and key vocabulary to strengthen cognitive connections

Planning with the brain in mind is at once about changing your mind figuratively, as it graciously considers the role of plan-ning in the teaching and learning process, as it is about changing students’ minds literally as you take advantage of neural plasticity to shape neural pathways.

What’s New in Brain-Based Planning?

One might ask: is there a need for another book on instructional planning? Hasn’t the story been told, and re-told? Les-son planning. Long- and short-range planningv. Curriculum mapping. Coherent curriculum. Spirals. Matrices. Webs. Models. Teachers have lots of choices. What can possibly be new and useful in this script? I think the fresh perspective is found in the emerging, engaging literature of cognitive science and its offspring, differentiated instructionvi.

Brain research compels teachers and coaches to change the ways that they frame questions about instructional planning. I like to call this brain framing, and it compels us to change the questions that we ask during the planning process.

Instead of asking: Reframe the question:

Which standards shall we teach? How can we entice the brain to pay attention to the standards?

How much content can we cover? Where can we chunk and layer concepts?

When is it time to test? How will I measure students’ knowledge, skills, and dispositions?

How many students are in this class? What capacity for growth and learning do my students possess?

Where will the scope and sequence take us? What is valuable and significant in the journey?

How can we motivate students? How can we create brain-friendly environments that encourage compas-sion, response, and curiosity?

Consider the scope of 32 million years of possible connections in a child’s brain. How can we give up on any student?M

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The standards and accountability movement of the 1990s and into the new millennium is not without merit. Clearly, it shifted issues of equity and excellence to the center of the public square. Yet, while this movement to count and sort data and demographics steamed ahead, fueled by legislation and policies including No Child Left Behind, AYPvii, and separate testing initiatives in every state, a perfect storm of research concerning the perfections and imperfections of the human brain gathered, threatening to derail the train.

Here’s an equation of sorts, defining the risks of an “accountability-only” philosophy that underplays the impact of brain framing. To understand this idea, take out a sheet of paper. Number your paper 1, 2, and 3. Then, add the following infor-mation next to each number:

1. NCLB = 3rd grade2. age 9 = pruning3. 4th grade = prison

There is a relationship among these variables. Do you recognize it? The story goes like this…..

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation sets the stage for all children to read on grade level (that is, proficiently) by the end of the third grade. There is a strong neurological precedent for that decision. You see….

By age 9, neural pruning kicks in and it seems that children who cannot read proficiently by that time may never do so. Hence…

There is a dangerous connection between these first two variables and the fact that the average reading level of those in prison in the U.S. is around 4th grade4. Children who cannot read proficiently enter adulthood at risk for many problems, including abuse, poverty, poor health, and even criminal activity.

How does this destructive cycle progress? Blame it on the pruning process. Neural pruningviii is just what it sounds like, the severing or removal of pathways that have not been hard-wired by stimulation or use. Learning to read is a critical task that the brain seems primed to undertake during early childhood. Moreover, there is substantial weight to the idea that language experiences during the 0-3 year period of human development are more predictive of later reading abil-ity than one might imagine. Every word that a child hears during the early weeks, months, and years begets more rich language pathways. As brain buffs like to say…

Neurons that wire together, fire togetherAnd neurons that fire together, wire together.

4 “Start Early, Finish Strong: How to Help Every Child Become a Reader.” U.S. Department of Education, accessed October 10, 2010, http://www.ed.gov/pubs/startearly/execsum.html.

Image: Neurons in Action

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Wiring Neurons with Innovative Instructional Planning

If our task is to wire and fire neurons in a dance of timing that considers critical periods and impending pruning, the planning process becomes at once more scientific and artistic. We want to assist with what cognitive scientists call den-dritic arborizationix, creating thick bundles of neurons that have woven together because of stimulation. This thicken-ing of neural connections occurs quickly in brighter children, those who have the advantage of a literacy-rich environ-ment, differentiated teaching, and encouragement. This typically happens naturally in homes where children are a priority, what anthropologist Annette Lareau5 calls a “missionary parent” home, but not for every child. Not for many children, even for most children.

The need for brain framing, then, seems imperative. Accessibility to rich, differentiated teaching in time to wire and fire the right neurons together! The scientific piece seems clear enough. The brain. Schemax. Cognition. Metacognition. All of this will be discussed thoroughly in the text. But what about the artistic side of teaching? Isn’t a medical model such as Brain Framing clinical, not aesthetic in its perspective?

Remember what Dr. Edelman shared earlier? The cortex offers such a thick abundance of possible neural connections that it would take 32 million years to count them. Only a creative, curious, flexible teacher-artist could imagine the right set of connections for each learner. The art of teaching has never been more essential than in today’s era of brain-framing education.

Moreover, emerging research from neuroscientists such as Richard Davidson and Daniel Goleman6 lends a subtle, yet compelling layer to the discussion of brain framing. One’s brain functions best when happiness and contentment flood neural pathways with life-giving serotonin and endorphins. A happy brain is a productive brain. One’s eudaimonia or well-being, often translated as “human flourishing,” is critical to learning. A student or a teacher, for that matter, flourishes when he or she is relaxed, feels capable and accepted, and is adequately challenged by stimulating, appropriate materials. Using functional MRIxi, scientists found that the brains of children and adults can grow and change in the arena of emo-tional intelligence. This suggests that teachers and students might journey collaboratively toward a learning experience that brings both knowledge and joy.

Studies on emotional aspects of learning also lend credibility to the importance of crafting sensory-rich environments that diffuse tension and anxiety. Each chapter in Brain Framing offers specific, practical suggestions for creating teaching environments that enhance emotional well-being.

Ask yourself, “How can I explain the importance of windows of opportunity or critical periods of learning to parents, so that they can become real partners in building neural pathways in the early years?”M

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5 Lareau, Annette. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.6 Goleman, Daniel. Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. New York: Bantam, 1997.