15 Tips to Align Your Teaching With Brain Science

It only takes a few seconds for a perfectly crafted lesson to fall apart.

“In an ideal world, all lessons would be flawless, your delivery would be impeccable, and all students would master the content every day,” writes first-grade teacher Anne Gillyard. In real classrooms, however, learning proceeds fitfully—by half measures—with the underlying dynamics of attention, memory, and emotion constantly in flux. 

Teaching the laws of motion or organic chemistry introduces dense, unfamiliar material to students, who are simultaneously trying to process everyday concerns like busy after-school schedules, the constant ping of cell phone notifications, or the aftermath of an argument with a friend. To teach effectively, then, educators need to be aware of both inputs and outputs—the difficulty of the material they are trying to convey, along with the cognitive systems that govern attention, the emotional factors that drive or dampen motivation, and the environmental cues that can either support or derail learning.

In a 2022 study, researchers discovered that a neuroscience-based professional development program not only improved teachers’ understanding of key brain functions like attention, memory, cognitive load, and emotion, but also led to meaningful changes in classroom instruction, resulting in “significant improvements” in students' reading competence, mathematical competence, and empathy. Understanding how student brains work doesn’t provide “exact rules that can tell the teachers what to do in every situation,” the researchers explain. Instead, it can help teachers understand the underlying mechanisms that shape learning and provide insights into how to fine-tune instruction to meet the needs of all learners.

Here are 15 tips to align your teaching with the science of how student brains work.

1. Work on Your Openers

The first few minutes of class set the tone for the rest of the lesson. Students’ brains are shifting from chatting with friends in the hallway to processing information and sustaining attention.

Abrupt transitions can momentarily tax students’ regulatory systems, which is why a steady, predictable opening procedure keeps cognitive load in check and helps them refocus. A 2018 study found that greeting students at the door, for example—a gesture that is both friendly and formal—increased academic engagement by 20 percentage points and decreased disruptions by 9 percentage points, adding up to “an additional hour of engagement” in a school day.

“If students come in knowing they’ll be required to write, read, or share at the launch of the lesson, they enter the room already anticipating that there is an immediate expectation,” writes Rebecca Alber, an instructor at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education & Information Studies. You can start class with a short, engaging activity—a rose and thorn check-in, math brain teasers, or a guess the connection riddle—to ensure that students start fresh, review previous learning, and direct their attention to the lesson’s topic. Be brief and stay on point, recommends music teacher Bill Manchester, enough to ensure a “smoother start” as students shift gears at the start of class.

2. Collect Regular Feedback

What you explain and what students understand aren’t always the same thing: Attention can falter, confusion can set in, and the accumulated debris of a long lesson can slowly overload working memory. 

That’s why high-performing teachers make diagnostic feedback a regular part of classroom activity, not just to check for student understanding, but to find out whether their own teaching hit the mark, researchers explain in a 2019 study. This feedback tended to reveal cognitive choke points—places where confusing directions, unclear expectations, or information overload sabotaged student learning.

Use short, anonymous surveys to gather feedback. Mix targeted prompts with open-ended questions—like “Are assignments clear?”, “What can I do to improve our classroom?”, or “Are there any topics we should spend more time on?”—to quickly surface what’s working and what needs refining.

3. Practice Planning With Students

One of the biggest obstacles to students performing well in class isn’t how well they understand the material, it’s their executive function skills—the ability to “plan, focus attention, switch gears, and juggle multiple tasks,” according to Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child. 

Students with poor executive function skills often underestimate how long tasks will take, miss due dates, or engage in no pre-planning at all. Explicitly teaching them how to map out their workload strengthens these skills and improves their chances of performing well on tests of knowledge, according to a 2017 study, which found that students scored a third of a letter grade higher when they were prompted to think through their study plan before an upcoming test.

You can build planning into your lessons by setting goals together and then asking students to monitor their progress via brief written reflections, or use task lists and other time management logs to make the concept of planning more tangible. Periodically, eighth grade teacher Catherine Paul asks her students to work as a class to develop a “priority list” of critical deadlines on the whiteboard, an activity that models effective planning and clarifies the next few days of work “because they have it spelled out very clearly for them.”

4. Re-Teach Highlighting

What may seem like a productive activity—using colorful highlighters to mark sections of text—actually does little to improve learning outcomes. In fact, a 2020 study concluded that “students often do not know how to highlight,” so the activity becomes a superficial “mechanism for tracking position in the text.” It’s only when highlighting is paired with other strategies—when students summarize the highlighted information in their own words, or translate highlights into flash cards to quiz themselves—that the information becomes encoded more deeply.

An hour or two of teacher instruction on highlighting has “a considerable effect on learning from texts,” making it a crucial step in helping inexperienced students avoid ineffective methods, according to a 2022 meta-analysis. When teachers explicitly model how to identify main ideas, limit highlighting to essential details, and connect those notes to follow-up strategies, students shift from passively marking text to actively processing and reorganizing it, leading to better comprehension and long-term retention. 

5. Audit for Clarity of Your Materials

An effective presentation can be sabotaged by poor design. Confusing layouts, distracting images and decorations, or too much text on a slide can overload working memory, siphoning off cognitive resources that students should be expending on the material. 

In a 2023 study, researchers found that adding bolded subheadings in a short text on local ecosystems doubled the readers’ retention rates, likely because the additional information prompted them to “think more about the content during reading.” Meanwhile, a 2020 study found that adding “visual scaffolding” to lesson materials—text labels, arrows, underlines, or cross-hatching to draw attention to crucial details, for example—improved recall by as much as 36 percent.

Regularly audit your materials to make sure you’re sequencing information thoughtfully, reducing complex instructions to plain English, using easy-to-read colors and fonts, and maintaining visual consistency so that students “do not have to hunt for the next piece of information,” suggests English teacher Ben Poulteney. When in doubt, distribute anonymous surveys to ask students questions like, “Do you have difficulty reading the text or hearing my voice?” or “What would have made this lesson clearer for you?” 

6. Use Frequent Low-Stakes Quizzes

When third-grade students studied a lesson about the sun, those who read a passage and then answered low-stakes practice questions scored 87 points on a follow-up test, a 2015 study found—34 points better than their peers who simply reread the material. “Hundreds of studies have demonstrated that testing (quizzing) is an effective strategy to boost classroom learning,” researchers conclude in a 2023 study. 

For best effects, keep your quizzes short, ungraded, and frequent, a “high-utility” approach that has been “demonstrated across an impressive range of practice-test formats, kinds of material, learner ages, outcome measures, and retention intervals,” according to a landmark 2013 study. You don’t have to stick to traditional quiz formats. In addition to multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, and short-answer quizzes, all of which work well, you can break lessons up with one-question quizzes, team quizzes, and quiz games to keep the stakes low while reinforcing the material. 

7. Integrate Regular Retrieval Practice

In a sweeping 2022 review, researchers explain that “a single session of retrieval practice can generate memory improvements that persist for 9 months, and the positive effects of retrieval over multiple sessions can last for at least 8 years.” Like a “fitness routine” designed to strengthen their memory of the material, retrieval practice should be an everyday classroom activity, with foundational material being revisited at key points throughout the year.

After covering a new concept, high school English teacher Cathleen Beachboard makes time for a “brain dump” immediately after, asking students to write down everything they remembered, such as definitions, examples, and connections to previous lessons. Don’t let kids take short cuts. It’s the effortful, “mentally difficult” practice of recalling information from memory without access to notes or a textbook that slows the brain’s natural forgetting process, according to the noted cognitive scientist Daniel WIllingham.

A Blast From the Past activity in Leah McGinnity’s fourth grade class—students spend five minutes solving two math problems from previous lessons and then discuss as a class—ensures that they are retrieving older information as they turn to newer, related material. Other teachers are a little sneakier, dropping references to past learning into quizzes or homework assignments to ensure that crucial material keeps cropping up throughout the year.

8. Break Up Lectures

Student attention has clear limits. As a lecture that covers new, dense, or abstract topics drags on, student focus fades as working memory reaches capacity and attention begins to drift. “Once cognitive capacity has been reached, the ability to maintain attention and process new information is hindered,” researchers explain in a 2021 study. To keep students attentive, break instruction into shorter segments, pause regularly, and integrate enhancement activities so students can process new information before moving on.

During breaks, a quick pause-and-partner exercise, for example, can provide time for students to catch up, compare notes, and reflect on any information they missed, according to a 2016 study, while a one- or two-question, low-stakes quiz can provide “incentives for students to attend more closely to material discussed in class,” researchers explain in a 2023 study. Non-academic breaks like theater games, charades or just an impromptu walk can be especially useful when “class appears sleepy and in need of a wake-up,” writes former elementary teacher Heather Sanderell.

9. Draw to Learn

Drawing requires students to translate concepts into visual form, revealing gaps in their knowledge while coordinating rich activity across the brain’s visual, motor, and semantic networks. Many kinds of drawing are beneficial: In a 2018 study, researchers found that representational drawings—a sketch of a flower or an illustration of a library when learning the Spanish word “biblioteca,” for example—nearly doubled factual recall. A 2022 study, meanwhile, concluded that sketching systems with interconnected parts—such as the water cycle or circulatory system—led to a 23 percent boost to higher-order thinking. 

Students who take the time to draw and write about what they’re learning, by sketching and annotating the phases of the moon or the growth of a flower, for example, tend to slow down and observe details they might otherwise overlook, sharpening their observation and analytical skills. “Drawing something requires students to look at their subject far longer than they are accustomed,” writes high school science teacher Selim Tlili. “Writing what they see forces them to consciously acknowledge it.”

10. Be Multimodal

Just as drawing helps students translate ideas into visual form, comprehension deepens when multiple modalities—seeing, hearing, speaking, touching, and moving—work together to anchor new concepts more deeply. 

In a 2020 study, neuroscientists discovered that 8-year-old students learning a new language had 73 percent better recall when they used their hands and bodies to mimic the target words, pretending to be a plane while learning the German word “flugzeug,” for example. Multimodal learning is a flexible approach that can also help students learn fractions using a basketball court or reinforce science concepts when paired with dancing and singing, studies show.

At Gilles-Sweet Elementary in Ohio, kindergarten teacher Keri Laughlin periodically asks her students to tap, stretch, and act out letter sounds during phonics lessons. Art, dance, and singing are incorporated into Nicole Goepper’s high school foreign language classes, and historical figures are brought to life in Irene Fusilli’s middle school social studies class.

11. Take a Walk (Brain Breaks)

We often underestimate the power of time away from academic work, neuroscientists assert in a 2021 study, after discovering that during downtime the brain rapidly replays the steps involved in learning a new skill. Short breaks allow the brain to consolidate information and strengthen neural connections, ultimately playing “just as important a role as practice in learning a new skill,” the researchers conclude, provocatively.

Third-grade teacher Wendy Turner uses a variety of brain breaks that suit different needs—energizing, creative, soothing, and relationship-building breaks—to help meet her students’ “needs at different times of day and in different situations.” For students in middle and high school, playful activities such as asking “Would You Rather” questions, a Snowball Toss, or a Jigsaw Jumble can prevent students from experiencing cognitive overload and provide space for reflection and recharging.

12. Scaffold Note-Taking

In a 2023 study, researchers found that students’ notes are “often low quality and incomplete,” capturing only 46 percent of the main ideas and supporting details in a lesson. Good note-taking is more than transcription, and can be thought of as the first step of a longer process. Ultimately, to learn from note-taking, students need to assess the completeness and usefulness of their notes before reorganizing, rephrasing, and synthesizing their thoughts to “capture the essence of lessons” and make meaningful connections. 

Literacy instruction coach Joshua LaFleur scaffolds note taking by asking students to form small groups and cocreate their notes on chart paper or whiteboards. “They’ll discuss, draw, and write key concepts, moving from superficial to deep understanding,” he explains. “While students are creating their notes, we are designing the opportunity to actively think about the material, compared with letting the lesson simply wash over them.” 

To push students to take even better notes, high school teacher Benjamin Barbour adopts the test average method: Students first take a test without notes, incentivizing good studying, and then take a test with their notes, incentivizing good note-taking. Both scores are averaged to reach a final grade.

13. Practice Metacognition

Governed by the prefrontal cortex, metacognition refers to a student’s ability to plan ahead, spot conceptual gaps in their thinking, and choose effective strategies for learning. In a 2021 study, researchers found that students who develop metacognitive awareness outperform peers who don’t, since they’re better able to recognize when an approach isn’t working and adjust in ways that improve learning.

Metacognitive questions help students “recognize success accomplished by reviewing, revising, or relearning instead of being satisfied with just ‘getting it done,’” explains neurologist and educator Judy Willis. 

After an assignment, encourage students to pause and reflect on their learning by:

• Spotting and writing about the muddiest point;
• Asking a wrap-up question like “What would you do differently in this lesson if you had more time?”;
• Monitoring their own academic growth via weekly stretch goals and other trackers;
• Asking themselves metacognitive questions as they encounter new learning, such as, “What stands out to me?”, “Which parts or terms are new to me, and which parts do I recognize?”, “Could I explain this clearly to my friend?”, and “What follow-up questions do I have?” (Bonus: Hang a poster of these questions in your room.)

14. Connect Learning to Passion

Emotion isn’t peripheral to learning; it’s a key ingredient in directing attention, consolidating memories, and giving students a sense of purpose and personal connection to a lesson.

In a 2024 study, neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and her team discovered that the more adolescents engaged in transcendent thinking—moving beyond the immediate facts of a situation to its broader implications—the more coordination there was between the executive control network, which governs focused thinking, and the default mode network, which governs internal reflection.

Emotions like passion and purpose serve as the bridge between these brain networks, ensuring that what students learn resonates beyond the classroom. 

Start lessons by asking, “How could you use the skill you’re learning now to do something important in the future?” says noted psychology professor David Yeager. Students will use the reflection to construct their own mental narrative about purpose, helping them to stay engaged even when things become hard or boring. You can also survey students at the beginning of the year to discover entry points into future lessons; set up a classroom station where students can explore future careers via websites like the BLS’s career exploration page and the College Board’s Career Pathway Tools; or periodically allow students to demonstrate knowledge in a format they choose (such as a podcast, video, or song).

15. Work On Your Closers

A strong closing activity is a brief form of immediate retrieval: It quickly brings students back to the central ideas of the lesson and reinforces what’s essential, while minimizing confusion or fragmented understanding. 

For economics teacher Sarrah Saasa, “closing the loop” with a reflection activity at the end of every lesson ensures that students understand the concepts before they shift gears. “We don’t want the kids to abruptly go onto the next class,” says Saasa. “We want to understand whether they’ve understood the concepts, and so we close the loop with reflection.”

Saasa begins the closer by asking students for key takeaways and ends with reflection questions such as, “What made sense to you most?” or “How were we as a class today?” Other closers such as creating a quick mind map (visually linking the learned concepts to help students organize ideas) or writing a two-dollar summary (students summarize what they learned in 20 words) offer brief but powerful opportunities to “correct, clarify, and celebrate,” writes professor of education Todd Finley.