Helping Students Understand How The Brain Works

While there are many great brain-based learning strategies out there, students may not fully buy into these strategies if they don’t understand why they work. And for many students, no one has ever explained that why. In my college classroom, I wanted my students to understand how their brains were working and why certain techniques would be more effective.

The simple and practical demonstrations I’ve used have been effective at the college level, but would be equally effective for upper elementary and middle school students too. My students often say, “I wish someone had told me this in elementary school!”

How the Brain Works: Neuroplasticity

Neuroplasticity simply means that everything you do changes your brain. When you try something new, your brain starts changing itself to meet this new challenge.

Activity: What if the world turned upside down? To introduce this idea to students, you will need glasses that affect your students’ vision and a foam ball. Place your students in groups of three. One person wears the glasses, one person tosses the ball, and one person records whether each throw results in a catch or miss.

At first, students will miss a lot, but soon they will improve. Students quickly recognize that their brains work to learn new things. If they keep trying at something, they can get better. If you want to learn more, check out this video about the research that inspired this activity.

How the Brain Works: Attention

Attention is how our brains decide what is important enough to keep thinking about in a world full of stimuli. Students like to think that they are great at multitasking. But, in reality, they are not.

Activity: Spotlight game. To help students understand the idea of attention, I ask students to spot different things around the room, and at the same time, change something in a funny or dramatic way in the front of the room.

I would either change the main screen to show a funny monkey or set a giant stuffed animal sloth on my table.

I had the students use flashlights in a slightly darkened room to find things because spotlights and zoom lenses are metaphors for attention. You can have all the students use little flashlights or have the students work in groups and pass the flashlight. After having the students “spotlight” about 10 things, ask who noticed the funny change at the front of the room. Most students completely miss the silly change, even though they may have thought they’d notice something like a giant stuffed animal.

This activity helps students understand that their attention is limited, and that they can miss big things if they don’t pause and take in the bigger picture. This is called change blindness, and this video is another way to demonstrate the concept.

How the Brain Works: Working Memory

Once you decide what should get your attention, you start to think about the information. Working memory is this first step.

Activity: Bin there, done that. This activity shows the importance of being able to group ideas together, an important component of working memory. For this activity, you’ll need a whole bunch of small items like tennis balls, stuffed animals, and markers; a big bin; and two students to volunteer to participate. One student is given the big bin to hold in their arms, and the other student has nothing. Then, you start handing each student items. The one with the bin can fill the bin up, keeping everything organized, while the other student will start dropping items they can’t hold on to anymore.

This is how working memory works: The student who can organize items can work with more information. This helps students understand why they need to learn categories and how new information fits together.

How the Brain Works: Long-term Memory

Different aspects of a memory are distributed across multiple areas of the brain. A simple way to think about this is that the visual area in the back of the brain (the occipital lobe) stores the visual part of a memory, and the sound area (the temporal lobe) stores the auditory part of a memory—and so on. All these parts of a memory are sent to the front part of our brain (the frontal lobe), which decides what it means.

Activity: The brain is a place. To help illustrate this idea, I use boxes around the room to represent vision, sound, touch, and action. In each box, I put items that represent that kind of information. In the vision box, I put paint samples to show color. In the auditory box, I put toys that make sounds. In the touch box, I place a range of different textures. For action, I make cards with action words.

Then, I have students take one item from each box and ask them to figure out what the different characteristics are referring to. For example, if a student pulled red, squeak, smooth metal, and pull, they would have to think of what one item would have all of these characteristics. Maybe a wagon?

This is how memory works. You have to pull from all the different parts of the brain to make sense of things. When completing this activity, you can also talk to students about how hard it would be to figure out the item if you only got one characteristic. For example, if you only got red, or just red and smooth, it would be hard to figure things out.

This activity helps model why teachers ask students to use different modes to engage with content (reading, writing, listening, art, etc.), so students can pull more information when remembering.

Each of these activities was a memorable experience for my students and helped them understand how their brains work to help them learn.