Brain Based Teaching Strategies to Build Executive Function in Students (Part 4 of 7)

Brain Based: Dr. Judy Willis (@judywillis on Twitter) is an authority on brain research as it relates to learning. She is a regular blogger at Edutopia. You can also find her online at RADteach.

For young brains to retain information, they need to apply it. Information learned by rote memorization will not enter the sturdy long-term neural networks in the pre-frontal cortex (PFC) unless students have the opportunity to actively recognize relationships to their prior knowledge and/or apply new learning to new situations.

Here are some teaching strategies to help build executive function in your students.

1) Provide Opportunities to Apply Learning

When you provide students with opportunities to apply learning — especially through authentic, personally meaningful activities — and then provide formative assessments and feedback throughout a unit, facts move from rote memory to become part of the memory bank.

These opportunities activate the isolated small neural networks of facts or procedures, which then undergo the cellular changes of neuroplasticity that link them into larger neural circuits of related information. These extensive neural circuits integrate new information when they are a) simultaneously activated and b) when they recognize patterns in common.