Brain Rules by John Medina

This book, Brain Rules: 12 Principles To Help You Survive and Thrive in Work, School and Home provides validation to the observations I harbored since I started teaching. These are as follows:

• Psychomotor activities benefits children's learning.

• Students don't pay attention to boring things.

• Too much lessons or activities aren't good for the brain.

• Exhaustion or too much physical activity hurts cognition.

• Our brains pay attention to things that are related to our experience, interests, and something that arouses our emotions.

• The brain is attentive only for 9 minutes and 59 seconds.

• Hooks are needed to keep our students engaged. Hooks are anything that can grab our attention through arousal of emotions (fear, laughter, jitters, surprise, etc).

• Hooks should be related with the lesson.
I think I can research, collect, and curate materials and resources that I can use as hooks.

• Our brains focus on the meaning of the concept rather than the details.

• A stressed brain is significantly less productive.

These are the new learnings I gratefully picked up from the book, and has improved the designs and implementation of my lesson plans.