Multi-Sensory Lesson Plan - "Modeling Brain-Based Strategies" for New Teachers

Multisensory Lesson Plan

by: Linda De Ivernois

Title of Lesson: Modeling Brain-based Strategies

Grade Level: K-12 Teachers

Objective(s): To better prepare educators to help their students by engaging diverse learners, offering effective feedback and creating a rich learning environment that attends to students’ social and emotional needs along with their developing brains.

Time: 2-hour session

KTAV	Activity Description
Kinesthetic	Modeling is one of the best strategies to use with teachers AND with learners. In order to “set the stage” for this professional development session and to build camaraderie, the facilitator has all participants stand in a circle. He/she holds up a beach ball, explaining that there are as many strategies/opinions as there are colors on that beach ball. As the facilitator tosses the ball to a participant, he/she must share a “warm-up” strategy that he/she has enjoyed in a class he/she has taken or one that has proven to be successful for him/her as an instructor. That person then tosses the ball to another participant and so on. No participant may repeat a “warm-up” strategy already used and this game will continue until no one can think of any other “warm-ups” to use.
Tactual	Setting a classroom climate and a mood or feeling for learning can be a mind-boggling task for educators, but if you involve the students in actually setting this climate, they will have more “buy-in”. To model this for your professional development participants, have them brainstorm all of the characteristics they can think of from a time when they were the learner in a classroom (it could be a fond memory or one they do not wish to replicate).  They are to write one characteristic per post-it note for as many as they can think of. Then, at their tables, they are to share their characteristics with their table mates, clustering “like” post-its together.
Auditory	After the table groups have clustered their “like” post-its, a “reporter” will report out the characteristics that were in common. After each table completes their oral “report-out”, one person from that table will post the post-its on the whiteboard in their own cluster. As each table continues, they will either build on that same cluster or create another cluster on the whiteboard.
Visual	After all of the tables have been represented, the participants will report to the whiteboard (one table at a time) to view and to bring back enough information to brainstorm at their tables. They will brainstorm ideas for lesson designs that will incorporate strategies that will elicit those same characteristics for their learners. As a table group, they will record 3 strategies on the “New Teacher” wiki that can then be used as a repository for all of the ideas generated during this session.