Brain-Based Learning: Theories and Strategies

Posted on Mar 3, 2025 in Early Childhood Education

Two New Theories

New theories must be integrated because every class is different, and so every child is different:

  • Everyone has an extraordinary learning potential. Our brain learns quickly and naturally.
  • The best atmosphere is multi-sensorial, stress-free, with no input, and varied.
  • Our paraconscious is activated through suggestion.
  • Listening and comprehension are introduced before oral production.
  • Movement is essential in order to learn.
  • Good teachers are born, not made.

The Brain

  • Neocortex: Cognitive thought. Two hemispheres. “The thinking brain”
  • Limbic brain: Emotions, beliefs, and values. Long-term memories. “The feeling brain”
  • Reptilian or primitive brain: The oldest part. Instinct survival. “The survival brain”

Analytic Hemisphere

  • Language
  • Logic
  • Numbers
  • Science
  • Maths

Holistic Hemisphere

  • Intuition
  • Imagination
  • Creativity
  • Arts
  • Music

Memory and Brain

Brief suggestions for a more memorable teaching:

  • It’s more likely that students remember things either at the beginning or the end of the lesson.
  • We should create or adapt activities in order to stimulate both hemispheres.
  • Emotions can involve memory.
  • Relevant activities lead to significant learning.
  • Multisensory planning (they should use all their senses).
  • General review.

Learning Styles (VAKOG)

Visual Learners

  • Reading and writing
  • Observant, organized student
  • Images
  • Pictures and outlines
  • Key words
  • Decorated walls
  • Flashcards, posters, colors, and shapes
  • Pictures and drawings

Auditory Learners

  • Reading aloud
  • Debates and discussions
  • Listening to people, CD player
  • Hearing
  • Role-plays, dialogues, drills
  • Oral production, songs, chants

Kinesthetic Learners

  • Body
  • Touching and going outside
  • Feelings and emotions
  • Movement
  • For use in class: Real objects, memory, and gestures, feelings and emotions, practical activities

Olfactory and Gustatory

Every class has three learning styles (VAK):

Olfactory and gustatory senses are useful during the first few months of someone’s life. Survival instinct. Less important for our cognitive development.

Multiple Intelligences

It’s a specific way of understanding our brain:

  • Flexible
  • Dynamic
  • Eight types
  • Independent and interrelated

Definition: Biological and physiological ability to understand, process, communicate, and represent information, so that we can solve problems and create products with parts important in a specific community, society, or specific background for some people.

Characteristics:

  • We all have intelligences, but differently.
  • Not fixed, not all is the same. We can have many intelligences of one type but not of another type.
  • No limit. There is a connection with our intelligence and our background.
  • Improved, developed, and spread.
  • There are 8 specific intelligences.

Rather than thinking of people as intelligent or unintelligent, we should recognize that we have a number of intelligences and that different people function more or less efficiently in these different spheres.

Goals of Education

Guide our students to their maximum development point, stimulate the way our students think.

Associative Analysis to Introduce a Topic

  1. Space: Where? How is it?
  2. Time: When? How much/many?
  3. Reason: Why?
  4. Utility: What for? Consequences? Who does it? What with?
  5. Origin: What with? From where? From when?
  6. Social and moral ethics: How? Which rules? What do you think about it? What would happen?