Whole Brain Teaching With Style: Book Club

To start at the beginning of this book club with me:

Buy the book Whole Brain Teaching for Challenging Kids
Read about Chapters 1 & 2 here
Read about Chapters 3 & 4 here
Read about Chapter 5 here
Read about Chapter 6 here
Read about Chapter 7 here
Join the Official Book Study here

Teach Okay is WBT's main strategy. We know that research shows that kids learn best when they teach each other and work in collaborative groups.

In order to do Teach Okay, the teacher talks for about 30 seconds, says "Teach", the students say "Okay" and teach each other what the teacher said. The teacher and students both use big gestures while teaching. There are four reasons for this: First, if students are suing gestures, then the teacher can easily see who is on task and who is not. Second, this brings in some kinesthetic learning and activates more areas of the brain. Third, this gives students who are antsy, overly active, or have ADHD some movement instead of being forced to still still and listen. And fourth, it's fun! Teach Okay brings laughter and fun into teaching and learning. Using gestures amps up the energy and gets everyone involved in learning! You can also add emotional content to your lessons while using Teach Okay and tap-into the limbic system, the emotional center of your brain. To do this, tell your kids "We're not afraid to learn this hard concept, actually it's easy! Tell your partner how easy it is." Or try "We're so excited to learn about ---- today. Tell your neighbor how excited you are."

The best ways to use Teach Okay (In my opinion):

Teaching the lesson or daily objectives - My students need to be able to verbalize these if the principal comes in, so I will be using this strategy daily!
Introducing essential vocabulary - My school uses the Marzano Vocabulary program, and I can really see the Teach Okay strategy going well for initially teaching each word.
When teaching language forms - I taught English Language Development to a group of intermediate language learners at my old school. My students had language partners that they sat next to on the carpet and had to practice using sentence frames to teach the weekly language form or function. Using Teach Okay would be a great way to do this practice!

Other variations: Switch!
The Switch technique is for students to practice both listening and speaking. Number your students 1 and 2 in each partner group. Tell the 1s to be teachers and the 2s to be listeners. Then loudly say "Switch!" The students repeat "Switch!" and switch roles. This is a great way for both students in a partner pair to verbalize the content being learned.

Teachers - use big hand gestures while they teach
Listeners - use listening gestures while they listen, such as holding a hand to their ear, nodding heads, silently mirroring the gestures of the teacher, or rolling hands as if to say "tell me more."

Other variations: The Tickler!

The Tickler is just a way to bring fun and laughter into lessons. Clap, tap, stomp, rub, whatever you want to do before you say Teach, then students repeat and say Okay. Guaranteed to get your class laughing and having fun! Most WBT teachers only do a few claps with the regular Teach Okay lessons and add in the wacky variations when they want to add in an extra spice of fun. Here are some extra Tickler ideas:

Disco dance moves (think: Saturday Night Fever)
Whirl a lasso over your head and say "Yeehaw Teach!"
Flap arms like flying
Air guitar
Chicken Dance
Hand jive

In Kinder or 1st grade, it is recommended to begin Teach Okay the second or third week of school. In higher grades, you can begin it on the first day. Once I finish this Book Club, I'll post my plan of how I will introduce each element of WBT, so stay with me until the very end! :)

For the book club, our assignment for this set of chapters was to create a lesson using the Teach Okay strategy. Here is the lesson I created to teach standard 2.NBT.A.1a: 100 can be thought of as a bundle of ten tens — called a “hundred.”

T: Oh my Class!

S: Oh my Yes!

T: (Using big gestures) Today we are going to learn about place value. Place value is the place, or position, of each digit in a number. (Clap clap) Teach!

S: (Clap clap) Okay! (Students repeat or paraphrase the definition of place value, using big gestures.)

T: Switch!

S: Switch!

T: (Holding up 1 finger) The first position is called the one’s place. These are numbers from 1 through 9 (drawing the numbers in the air with pointer finger). Teach!