Whole Brain Teaching for Challenging Kids: (and the rest of your class, too!) Paperback – Almanac Calendar, March 4, 2013

I've been teaching for over a decade and am so happy to have found Whole Brain Teaching. My favorite techniques are the Class-Yes attention signal, mirror, teach-okay, the rules, the super improver chart, and the power pix. I started implementing the WBT strategies about 3 years ago and found them so effective.Here are a reasons I fell in love with these strategies.1. Class-Yes - I use this countless times a day. It works with a classroom of students and also a whole grade level. No more bells, whistles, or yells--using a spirit of fun and a smile to get instantaneous quiet and attention is amazing.2. Mirror/Teach-Okay: Just using these to make sure students have heard and remembered instructions is fantastic. Students mimic the teacher and then teach a classmate what was just said. So simple, yet so effective.3. The rules - Students love when it's their turn to lead the rules. Imagine students actually complaining that they didn't get to lead the rules practice when there was a sub!4. The Super Improver system - It's all positive. Students can help set goals for themselves. These can be academic and behavioral goals. It's truly like a video game as they work to move up a level. Several students mentioned that this was a favorite in their end of the year writing.5. The Power Pix - Students have fun practicing vocabulary and academic concepts. Seven-year-olds can tell me the difference between a proper noun and a pronoun. Imagine students begging to review these concepts. Imagine actually having to tamp down the excitement as students practice telling what a noun is, so that we don't disturb the classes next door!The Coach, Chris Biffle, constantly mentions "teacher heaven," but I've come to realize he is not joking. I've seen it. This book lays it out so clearly. You need it!

This book simply rocks! Do you need ideas to help making your teaching more engaging? Engagement stops behavior problems in its tracks. This great book covers a super attention getter called Class Yes, which combines with the scoreboard (points the class earns for making good choices and poor choices or simply not quick enough) to help keep children on task. The book also includes Hands and Eyes a great way to focus students, 5 terrific classroom rules, Teach-Okay and Mirror both of which have children using gestures to teach each other concepts, the Super Improvers Wall to help focus children in on wanting to improve instead of just rewarding your brightest students, and practice cards for your toughest students to keep them on the right track.The book also covers the brain research behind Whole Brain Teaching, Critical Thinking, The Five Step Lesson Plan, Writing ideas, and many other wonder teaching tips that will engage even your toughest students. I wish I had known about this amazing program when I taught some of the toughest students as I know this would have helped them greatly.Pick up the book and also do yourself a favor and hop on over to Whole Brain Teaching .com (no spaces) and check out the videos, free ebooks and more fun on the website!Brian Hopkins

Chris Biffle is an amazing and creative teacher. Teachers provide You Tube videos online in which you can view children and teachers using his techniques in classroom management. You might want to watch them just to smile, because it is so cute to see a little first grader presenting to her class or to see a sixth grader working with other students and mirroring the instruction. The class videos are on You Tube and his instructional sessions are in his webcast. I teach high school kids. I saw some of these techniques on his webcast and in the You Tube videos and I have begun using some of them with my eleventh grade students during summer school. I am very pleased with the results so far and I intend to use these techniques with my ninth, tenth honors, and eleventh grade students this Fall. I have been teaching for sixteen years and I have never seen a set of techniques that created an environment in which students are so engaged with what they are learning. I don't talk as much now and the kids are actively learning instead of sitting and staring at me. I still have a long way to go in learning this, but I already feel like I am a more effective teacher and I see that my classroom is more fun and interesting to the students. I am still reading the book, so I haven't completed it yet, but it is supported with many free and very helpful examples and instruction online.

The book contained a lot of very good ideas for the classroom and as a first year teacher I am looking for all the ideas that I can get. I felt that it was a little rigid as far as following the entire process down to the letter, but there were many good ideas that can be incorporated into most grades.

This book got me through some college teaching courses that I was having a hard time understanding and this book also gave me other perspectives. 100 out of 100