This will be my first year teaching high school English. I am going into my third year of teaching; for the first two years I taught 7th and 8th grade. I just discovered whole brain teaching on yesterday and I'm very amazed by what I've read and seen in the videos. I really wish I would have found out about it two years ago; I think the middle schoolers would have really enjoyed this. I would really like to try this in my classes this year even though this will be my first time teaching high school(11th and 12th grade). Do you think it's a good idea for me to try and implement it at the beginning of the year since I'm new to high school? Do you think it will work out well with this age group? Also, does anyone have any tips and ideas on how to make this work for literature/grammar? I am very interested in any ideas you have to offer. Also, another concern I had was the noise level during teach-ok. It seems that this will be very beneficial but at the same time the environment may be too noisy for some students to hear other students teaching. How do you deal with the issue of noise during teach-ok?

I have some of the same questions. I was introduced to power teaching a few days ago, and I've been teaching English for 9 years. I have taught all levels from junior high through university, and I really would love to use this technique. I simply don't know how to use it when I am teaching literature. I want my students to think for themselves, and I worry that if I teach literature this way, I will be teaching them to think what I think.

Please help us! I'd love some suggestions or videos of this being done!

Thanks!

Okay, let's try and answer these all at once.

The method works great with pretty much any age group. We have people teaching from PreK through college level with it.

I teach 8th grade, and I am an adjunct history instructor at a local community college. At both levels the students love it. With older learners I explain why we are using the method, and its impact on their memory.

On telling them how to think, you need to remember that what you know so far is the very basic level of Teach-OK and the other methods. You can easily step this up as you and they get used to using it. Start out with the basics, get familiar, both you and them. After that it is easy to apply this as you explore higher order thinking skills. Yes, you can get the HOTS for WBT!

Here is an example of what I mean:

At the start of last year my classes needed to learn the definition for science. The one in the book was long and dry, and not very middle school brain friendly.

My kids are always divided up at tables in pairs. I had everyone take a piece of paper and make a T table. "What science is" on one side, and "what science is not" on the other.

We did a brainstorming session, Teach-OK with a Switch.

In the first run through One's spoke first and for thirty seconds they taught their partners anything that came into their brains that defined science, science was used to do, or was related to science, there were no wrong answers, just whatever they could think of.

I called them up with Class-Yes. They had one minute to write down what the partners agreed were the three most important points the One had come up with. Now we repeated the process, the Two's teaching, and identified what science was not, and what could not be done with science.

We wrote those down on the T table. Next we Switched roles. Two's taught first, What science is, trying not to repeat their partner's definitions...and so on.

In the end both partners taught each side of the problem. Now we had a class discussion shared what each set of partners had come up with. We added, and streamlined it, and arrived at a definition: Science is a methodical way of learning how things work.

Could I have just told them that? Sure! But now they owned the definition, and they had a much greater understanding of what science can and cannot do.

Sounds like analysis and Synthesis to me, with a little evaluation thrown in.

Did that help?

Jeff