Johanna Busch
Whole Brain Teaching
My school utilizes an engagement strategy called Whole Brain Teaching (WBT). WBT was created by Chris Biffle and is intended to engage multiple parts of the brain in learning. Students simultaneously gesture, listen, watch, and share new material so that they are engaging many different brain pathways. This increases student engagement and retention of new content. WBT strategies for teaching new content with classroom management strategies that help to increase on task, productive behaviors.
Mirror Words! Teach Okay!
I use WBT to introduce new reading comprehension skills and strategies as well as other information. Each new point is paired with a gesture. I teach students the content and the gesture using "Mirror Words." My students know that whenever I say "Mirror Words," they must repeat my words and copy my gestures. After repeating a few times, I release students to teach the new content to their neighbor by saying "Teach Okay." Students then teach their neighbor the new content. Finally, I call students back to attention using the "Class Yes" attention getter.
My students love using mirrors and often get very animated when learning new gestures. Students are able to develop deep understandings of new concepts and build connections between concepts because everything is tied to a gesture. I can quickly remind students of a concept, such as author's purpose or story structure, using just a gesture. This content is also usually tied to anchor charts in my classroom. I introduce anchor charts with important content while using mirror words, so that students are reading, hearing, gesturing, and saying the new content. The Teach Okay portion of this strategy is especially important as it requires students to teach their neighbor the new content they just learned. Teaching content to someone else allows students to work through new material with a peer, working together to build deeper knowledge.
Story elements is one concept that I taught using mirror words. Below I show the process used to teach this concept using Whole Brain Teaching. First, I plan gestures with my team members. Then, I create an anchor chart. Next, I introduce the content to students using WBT methods. Finally, students apply this information to a reading comprehension task. Simultaneously engaging multiple learning pathways increases student engagement and supports students who might struggle to retain material that is only presented in one way. Using multiple pathways to teach new content helps students develop a deeper understanding of the content.
Creating WBT Gestures
Before implementing this instructional strategy, I decide the key points that students need to know and come up with a gesture for each of them. Because my whole school uses WBT, this often involves consulting with other teachers on my team or first or third grade teachers to ensure consistency. Story elements are concepts that are referred to over and over again throughout elementary school. Developing consistent gestures for these elements helps students to retain this information and be able to use this skill to comprehend texts.
Once I have these gestures, I write them into my lesson plans. Below is a screenshot from a lesson plan where I introduced the four story elements using Mirror Words and Teach Okay.
Anchor Charts
WBT is an effective instructional strategy because it allows students to learn new information through several different pathways. One of these pathways is reading written information. I create anchor charts for new information that is being introduced using WBT. Students read the anchor charts while they are learning the new content. Furthermore, these anchor charts stay on my wall throughout the year. Since these anchor charts have been brought to life through WBT, students are able to reference back to these anchor charts to apply the skills they learned to new situations.
Below is the anchor chart I created when teaching the story elements. When introducing new concepts, such as story structure, I often refer back to this anchor chart. Furthermore, I often hear students referring back to it and using the associated gestures when they are reading new texts. For example, students completing a book report during center time might refer back to this chart in order to identify the four story elements in the book they are reading. The connection between anchor charts and gestures especially supports students who are still developing their reading abilities. Even students who could not independently read words like "characters" are able to reference this anchor chart because they remember the gestures associated with the words.
This is an image of a story elements anchor chart that was introduced to students using the WBT instructional strategy of Mirror Words. The anchor chart remains on our classroom wall so that students can refer to this concept and build new connections between and among content areas.
Using WBT in the Classroom
Once I have planned and created an anchor chart, I introduce the new material using the Mirror Words, Teach Okay, and Class Yes cycle. Students mirror my words and gestures, teach each other the content, and then are called back to attention using Class - Yes. This strategy allow students to develop a deep understanding of new content, as it is introduced through an anchor chart, gestures, words, and teaching it to a friend.
Below is a link to a video of my class learning the four story elements using the WBT cycle. Watch as students engage in Mirror Words, Teach Okay, and Class Yea to learn the four story elements.
Applying New Content
After learning new content using WBT, students apply this content. In this case, students learned the four story elements. Students then listened to a read aloud of the story Strega Nona. Students then identified the four story elements in this text and wrote them on a graphic organizer. Using gestures to learn the four story elements helped them to apply this comprehension strategy to a text. Students referenced these elements using gestures and the anchor chart. Students independently identified the characters, setting, problem, and solution, practicing an important comprehension skill with an authentic text.
Here is the video of the read aloud of the story Strega Nona that students watched. This video is taken from Youtube.
After watching the read aloud of Strega Nona, students meaningfully applied the concepts that they learned through WBT by identifying the story elements. Two student work samples of the graphic organizer they completed are shown below. WBT is an effective instructional strategy because it is engaging for students at many academic levels. Both of the students who completed the below work were incredibly engaged during the WBT lesson of story elements. Furthermore, WBT specifically helped the student with an IEP who sometimes struggles to retain information. The multiple methods of learning the same content support these students and allow them to successfully apply important comprehension skills even if they are still working to master reading and writing.
The image above shows the graphic organizer of a student on an average reading and writing levels. This student was able to independently identify all four story elements in the story and record them in the graphic organizer.
The image above shows the graphic organizer of a student with an IEP who struggles with reading and writing. Though it was difficult for this student to write all of the answers, she was able to identify the problem and solution orally and using pictures. One of her accommodations is a scribe, so I recorded what she said for the problem and solution.
Teacher Reflection
When I first started using WBT in my classroom last year, the gestures and lingo did not come naturally to me. However, observing other teachers classroom and watching videos showed me how engaging WBT can be for students when implemented correctly. I worked hard to improve my own implementation of WBT. This year, I have found WBT to be an especially effective strategy for teaching reading comprehension skills. Almost every comprehension concept students have learned, such as author's purpose, story structure, or main idea, is taught with gestures, anchor charts, mirror words, and teach okays. WBT strategies help students develop deeper understandings of reading comprehension strategies by teaching the same content through multiple modes and allowing students to teach content to each other. WBT also helps students to apply this knowledge in new settings by providing them with tools (gestures and anchor charts) that allow them to remember and use this content.
Though I am still learning and getting better at using WBT in my classroom, it is now a key strategy that I use to teach reading comprehension as well as other new information. WBT allows my students to learn and apply new content in an engaging, understandable way.