7/20/2023 0 Comments Brain gym and moreThe more you use them, the more your brain will respond. They are all very simple and each only takesĪ few minutes at most. The following are examples of key Brain Gym exercises. Brain Gym can help everyone get more out of their brains – and more out of life. However Kay stresses that Brain Gym is not just for children with learning difficulties it can help everyone, Even those who think they have perfectly normal brain function will find the exercises will help them perform even better. Educational Kinesiology changed everything. At school I was always being told to “try harder” but I literally couldn’t work any harder. She says, “It changed my life, quite literally I can’t put it strongly enough. Kay McCarroll, whose dyslexia ruined her school days, now teaches and promotes the system in the UK. Researcher Dr Paul Dennison found that very simple body movements could help to improve brain function. It gives you a cutting edge both in the office and in your personal life, improving communication skills, helping you make better decisions and even giving you a boost when you’re facing rejection or disappointment.īrain Gym is the practical self-help side of Educational Kinesiology, a system which developed out of work with dyslexia and learning disabilities in children. It can improve your eyesight and even increase your creativity. Brain Gym can do everything from speeding up your reading to boosting self-esteem. Brain Gym comprises very easy body movements which have been designed to coax the two hemispheres of the brain to work in synchronisation.Īpparently when our brains become balanced, our whole bodies respond, revitalising our natural healing mechanisms, restoring health and harmony. It doen’t make it necessarily a bad thing that children are forced to do something but intinsically one would hope they and their parents appreciate what’s going on and are on board.A simple series of exercises could help your brain function better, making you sharper, smarter – and far more confident. Same for anything in the curriculum really. So children should/shouldn’t be forced to do it …. This amount of Mindfulness works/ doesn’t work … This is the most effective type of Mindfulness programme is … Mindfulness is better than X because Y… and Z … that have been tried don’t work(could put in Brain Gym here). Mindfulness is helpful to developing children because of these effects …. these are the effects on the mind/brain and these are the benefits… It works with children more/less/the same as in adults because …. It works in adults because … these are the effects on the mind/brain and these are the benefits… What we are trying to achieve with Mindfulness in schools is a), b) and c)… And these 92,000 (I’ll just polish them off later today) boil down to what exactly? Those who buy into the program are either “children who naively assume their teachers know what they are doing or teachers who are bamboozled by the pseudoscientific jargon or seduced by charismatic and enthusiastic believers.” ( Carroll 2009) Verdict: Watson and Kelso (2014) found Brain Gym “does not produce clear and substantial differences in academic engagement” but “even with the inadequacy of empirical support, Brain Gym is still an often promoted intervention.” Of the few published studies one involved four participants, one of whom was the author of the study and the others were published in a journal that required the authors to pay for publication.Īnother study had severe methodological failings. There is no evidence that Brain Gym improves academic skills, listening and thinking skills, or learning disability deficits ( Hyatt, 2007) The founders claim that laying brain-training games can help improve your memory, concentration or intelligence and the Brain Gym website makes lots of grand statements but these are backed by zero evidence.īrain Gym do cite evidence on its site but the research it drew on has been widely discredited. Brain Gym is a movement based programme based on the idea that moving leads to optimal learning and “we empower all ages to reclaim the joy of living.” It has “bad science” written all over it “with a scientific explanatory framework that is barkingly out to lunch.”Ĭreated by Paul and Gail Dennison in the 1980s, Brain Gym is the shop-front name for what they call Education Kinesiology or Edu-K. In a brilliant article, Charlie Brooker once warned us to, “ Man the lifeboats, the idiots are winning.“īrain Gym is a classic piece of snake oil in education that has been mis-sold to thousands of schools and has been peddled by many in order to cash in on the neuroscience gold rush. In between teaching jobs, I worked as an Ofsted inspector (no hate mail please!), national in-service provider, project. John DabellI trained as a primary school teacher 25 years ago, starting my career in London and then I taught in a range of schools in the Midlands.
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