Whole Brain Teaching, WBT for short

WBT is one of the vastest and growing education reform movements. With more than 60,000 registered members (how to register for free), outposts in more than 30 foreign countries, let alone in all the states across the U.S.A., over 2 million YouTube views, over 10 million pages of free e-BOOKS and teaching materials downloaded from  www.wholebrainteaching.com, WBT is one of the most popular educational websites.

Who invented Whole Brain Teaching?

A college teacher called Chris Biffle started to experiment with a brain friendly system that would tackle one of the major weaknesses of the traditional educational system before seriously considering a change of vocation. We are referring to the failure of the educational system to stimulate the students sufficiently, by activating their brains completely, thus leaving scope for boredom and ultimately challenging behaviour to mushroom during classes.

Together with other peer teachers, Chris Rekstad and Jay Vanderfin, teaching in elementary school and kindergarten, they began to see dramatic changes in their students.

Experimenting over a period of time, correcting temporary errors, the three and a group of other instructors made a breakthrough discovery: they found that their students were completely engaged in class when they were emotionally involved in lessons that required seeing, saying, hearing and physically moving. Based on this, they developed a core method that involves many brain activities simultaneously, leaving too little area of the brain free for negative behaviours and irrelevant thinking. WBT was designed exactly to replace the wrong techniques of traditional teaching that get teacher nowhere in the battlefield with challenging children.

How exactly does WBT work?

As mentioned above, WBT is a grass roots education reform movement. Based on simple but effective teaching principles and techniques, it is adapted by the teacher to suit his/her specific class and subject. Within the community of The Whole Brain Teachers of America, WBT is constantly improved and developed by the teachers for the teachers worldwide, for those who wish to enliven their classes and minimalise disruptive behaviour within their environments.

All of us have experienced, at one stage or another in our lives, disruptive behaviour in various degrees, whether as initiators, witnesses or victims of it. In a classroom, during a class, disruptive behaviour emerges for a simple reason: the students' brains demand activities which the classroom environment doesn't provide. The WBT method of teaching tackles these behaviours at the source, eliminating the need for them in the first place, based on the principle that if a student's whole brain is involved in learning, there isn't any mental area left over for challenging behaviour.