![Best Practices at Tier 1 [Secondary] - Gayle Gregory](/cover_679455.jpg "Best Practices at Tier 1 [Secondary] - Gayle Gregory")
environment marked by appropriate stress levels, which neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (2003) calls maximal cognitive efficiency and describes as occurring when challenge meets skill.
As you can see, high alert is not an optimal condition for classroom learning. Students thrive when they have both a high motivation to succeed and appropriate levels of stress. In an environment of excessive stress levels, student performance and engagement suffer (Goleman, 2006c). Therefore, controlling the level of stress within the classroom matters deeply in maximizing student learning.
Environmental Stressors
By controlling the types and levels of environmental stressors, educators can create a brain-friendly environment that promotes optimal learning conditions and eliminates the anticipatory anxiety students suffer when they are in constant fear of unexpected and upsetting events. A brain-friendly classroom, therefore, is one governed by clear, logical, and well-explained routines. A lack of clear and reliable routines can be one of the greatest sources of stress in any classroom. Without clear direction, consistent practices, well-defined learning goals, and established criteria for gauging learning progress, students can feel lost, unnerved, and powerless to play a determining role in their own academic success.
Rather than condemning students to a classroom experience filled with stress and anticipatory anxiety, educators who supply clarity, structure, and ample emotional and physical support in the classroom create a climate of relaxed alertness that can aid, rather than inhibit, student learning. The following list offers three practical guidelines for building a classroom environment that encourages student learning and academic success—not rules, so much as healthy habits that help teachers and students work together effectively.
1. Develop norms or expectations for classroom behaviors: Students can contribute their own ideas to this list, but here are some critical expectations for every classroom (see also Gibbs, 2006).
2. Build a community: Students must know one another and respect the differences, strengths, and needs of fellow students. Teachers need to stress the idea that students are to learn together and help each other. That understanding sets students on the path of collaboration. In a differentiated classroom, students will work in partnerships and in groups of all sizes. Those collaborative alliances give students an opportunity to better know their classmates and to share ideas and opinions in the relative safety of a few individuals, rather than in front of the entire class where students can feel more vulnerable to ridicule (Gregory & Kaufeldt, 2012). Furthermore, group interactions in a learning community may actually promote brain health. Edward Hallowell (2011) suggests we have a biological need to interact with others, and if that need too often goes unfulfilled, we actually lose brain cells. Hallowell’s findings also support Maslow’s (1968) and Glasser’s (1998) basic needs theories of belonging and being included.
3. Establish classroom organization and management strategies: Clear classroom routines and procedures reduce anticipatory anxiety and save time and disruption in the classroom. Any confusion in this area will result in a lot of off-task behavior among students. Educators, therefore, should establish procedures that address:
Besides teaching these guidelines, posting or displaying them in the classroom so students can refer to them while working provides support for successful interactions and creates autonomy and efficacy.
Healthy Brains and Bodies
Of course, the physical environment isn’t the only factor that influences student learning. Students also require adequate physical movement and nutrition in order to remain alert and on task throughout the day. Fortunately, educators also have some influence over these elements of a safe and supportive classroom environment.
When students sit all day, they deplete the flow of blood to their brain. Without adequate blood flow, the brain doesn’t receive the levels of oxygen and glucose necessary to support its operation at levels of high efficiency. That’s why it’s so important that students have an opportunity to get up and move throughout the day. Physical activity helps wake up the learner. The importance of physical activity in brain health goes beyond its role in improving blood flow. University of Illinois studies show that regular exercise can increase the basal ganglia and hippocampus in a child’s brain (Reynolds, 2010), changes which improve attention, memory, and cortical functions. (The basal ganglia is found at the base of the forebrain, and its main role is to monitor and regulate activities in the premotor and motor cortexes to facilitate seamless voluntary movements. The hippocampus, a small seahorse-shaped organ in the temporal region of the brain, is part of the limbic system and thus helps regulate emotions. It is also responsible for creating long-term memory during rapid eye movement [REM] sleep and is instrumental in spatial navigation.) Furthermore, twenty minutes of exercise will increase blood calcium, which stimulates the brain’s release of dopamine (the pleasure neurotransmitter). An associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, John Ratey (2008), suggests that even mild exercise releases norepinephrine and serotonin, two neurotransmitters that help regulate energy
