WBT Book Club First Assignment

This morning, I earned my first 25 WBT Certification Points from the WBT Book Club! Can I get a ten-finger "wooo"?  The following is a response I wrote for chapters 1 and 2 from the book,  "Whole Brain Teaching for Challenging Kids."  For this assignment, "Coach B says... "You've just been made principal of a charter school and you're about to address your staff for the first time. Select three points from chapters 1 and 2 that you are going to talk about describing key aspects of Whole Brain Teaching. Include one story about your teaching experience."

Welcome back to the beginning of a new school year!  We have a good deal of “news” to share:  new principal, new faculty members, a new crop of students, and a not-so-new teaching system we will be embarking on together this year, Whole Brain Teaching.

As the 2002 Outstanding Teacher of the Year, Rafe Esquith, so succinctly stated, “There are no shortcuts to excellence.”  My own journey in education has taken me over twenty years to be here with you today.  My first job in education was working at the Child Care Center at Rowan University, where I learned a good deal from working with toddlers and preschoolers. 

Whole Brain Teaching tells us, “The longer we talk, the more students we lose.”  There was no “lecture” with preschoolers—there was circle time, there were learning centers, there was free play. Did they learn? Yes, because they were having fun and they were engaged:  their little brains were filled with motion and songs, finger plays, rhyme, and repetition.  When we think about it, isn’t that what all of our students want—to have fun?

As you will soon learn, beginning with our introductory seminar this afternoon, “If a student’s brain is involved in learning, there isn’t any mental room left for challenging behavior.”  With Whole Brain Teaching, when practiced daily, you will find your students completely engaged in class, and emotionally invested in lessons that have them seeing, saying, hearing, and physically moving.  Will our hallways be filled with noise? Yes. But more important, they will be permeated with the echoes of students learning.

~Jacqueline Nessuno