Whole Brain Developer: Teach-OK

Jeff Battle, Director, North Carolina Power Teachers

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Next you should use the most important of the Power Instruction's learning methods, Teach-OK.

When you are instructing your students about foundational concepts, it's time to step out from behind the worksheets! Open your students’ brains and give them a learning experience that is both effective, and fun.

Teach-Ok is the component that accomplishes this. This technique allows you to simultaneously engage your students in all four learning modes -- seeing, saying, hearing and doing

Conceptual differentiation in one fell swoop! ... and in a way that your students will enjoy.

Twenty years of education research tells us that the most effective learning takes place when a student engages the brain's primary cortices- visual, auditory, language production and motor- at the same time. Further, as students enjoy the experience, their limbic systems become involved. This is the portion of the brain that controls emotional engagement. As you involve all four learning modes at once, and attach a positive emotional experience, students form deep and lasting anchors for the information they are acquiring.

Ben Franklin (and an ancient Chinese proverb) said “Tell me and I will forget, teach me and I will remember, involve me and I will learn.”

Additionally, learning research indicates that teachers, as a general rule, TALK TOO LONG!  The longer we talk, the more students we lose.

Short term memory for most people is limited to 3 to 7 items.   As new information is added to short term memory, recently acquired information is dropped.  You can only fill the cup so full and then it overflows.  Your students have small cups!    What we do in Power Instruction is talk in shorter chunks- thirty seconds to one minute.  We focus our lessons into groups of two, three or at most four points.  We are teaching to short term memory, a small cup, which quickly fills.  Teaching for shorter periods of time and presenting fewer  points, takes some practice ... but it is easier than it seems.

Teach-OK works like this:

Divide your class into teams of two. One student is a One, the other member of the team is a Two.

You want students to do a large amount of the teaching. Present a small amount of information, complete with gestures. When you finish, look at the class and clap two times, say “Teach!” Your students clap twice and respond “OK!”  Look at our Power Teachers videos for examples of this approach.

Teach your students to copy your gestures (kinesthetic) and mimic the emotion in your tone of voice (limbic).  As your students teach each other, move around the room listening to what they are saying.  This is an excellent opportunity to monitor student comprehension.  Then, call them back to attention with the Class-Yes!  If you are not convinced your students have understood your lesson, repeat it.  Otherwise, go on to the next small group of points.

You can either let your students find their own natural way of determining who speaks or listens, or provide more structure using "Switch!" described later.