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Hello everybody and thanks for joining! My name is Shayna and I will be helping to moderate the webinar today. The title of today’s webinar is: Press Pause and Power Up: The Case for Brain Breaks. Soon we will be joined by Meshia, our presenter, but before we get started, I’d like to take just a few moments to talk about model teaching, our courses, and the services that we provide!
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Model Teaching is a provider of professional development courses, offering them to educators across the country as well as globally, including individual K-12 teachers, schools, and school districts. All Model Teaching courses are founded on research-backed principles and cover the most important topics in education today. Our menu has hundreds of courses available, and is always growing, adding new courses monthly.
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We offer several different types of courses, but most commonly PD (clock hour) and credit courses. Our PD courses can generally be used for state recertifications and are often used by schools and school districts for whole campus professional Learning. Our credit courses are offered in partnership with universities found across the country. These can also be used for state recertification in most states, as well as salary advancement for folks who require semester credits to advance their salary. Some of the features that make our courses unique include very reasonable course pricing, and in fact, we offer bundled packages where users can build their own bundle of courses from our entire menu, based on the number of credits or hours that they need. Having this bundle option allows us to offer our services to teachers at a much lower cost than most providers. Model teaching courses are also known for being very straightforward, flexible, and they allow users to demonstrate their knowledge in a more implementation-focused way that doesn’t require long essays and other time-consuming assignments.
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The webinar that you will be watching today is a Model Teaching Spotlight Webinar. Our spotlight webinars are designed to provide teachers with easy-to-implement strategies and concepts, all within a quick, bite-sized, 30-minute time frame. The webinar that you are attending today is composed of content taken from our course titled: Brain Breaks in the Classroom Giving Students a Mental Break During Rigorous Classwork This course covers the benefits of brain breaks and explores simple brain break strategies you can implement through your lessons. You will have the opportunity to plan to implement brain breaks, leave the course with ideas and strategies to immediately add these ideas to your next lesson. Today’s webinar will offer a summary of the basic principles found within this course.
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Now to kick off our webinar, I’d like to introduce our speaker for today. Dr. Meshia Casey is a curriculum writer and instructional designer with Model Teaching whose work is rooted in a deep understanding of how people learn, think, and change. With a background in curriculum and instruction and a focus on educational psychology, she designs learning experiences that move beyond theory and into real, sustained practice. With a background in special education and training in Orton-Gillingham, she brings a strong foundation in structured, evidence-based instruction and accessibility-centered design. Her work consistently focuses on creating learning experiences that are clear, engaging, and built for implementation. And now I’ll turn this webinar over to Dr. Casey to get started!
[Slide 6]
Video recording begins now] Thank you—I really appreciate that introduction. At the core of my work is a deep interest in how people actually learn—not just how we teach, but how information is processed, retained, and applied in real life. My background is in curriculum and instructional design, with a focus on educational psychology, so I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes learning stick. What I’ve found is that even the best content can fall flat if it’s not designed with the learner in mind. So the work I do is really about translating ideas into learning experiences that feel clear, accessible, and usable. I’m excited to be here and to share some ideas that you can take and apply in your own context. So today we will be talking more about why brain breaks are important for your students, evaluate a bit more about what they are and how they can be effective in your classroom, and then plan for a few simple brain break strategies that you can immediately implement
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I want you to just take a minute and think about the last time you hit a wall as you were completing a work project, or really any other intense task you were really focused on. Maybe you have to take a daily break in the afternoon each day to give yourself a moment of rest and recharge. Or maybe after an intense hour of focusing on working on a lesson or some kind of complex planning task, you feel you need to pause for a minute and give yourself a moment to recover. Think about when you were in college or graduate school and you were in the middle of some intense studying. You probably took several breaks to maintain your momentum. And what kind of breaks did you take? You May have gone on a quick coffee break or decided to take a quick walk around your neighborhood or maybe you just even got up and walked around or did some stretches. Students hit these same kinds of walls and often they don’t really ever have a chance to do anything about it. Today in this webinar I’m just going to make the case to you that allowing your students to press pause during their day isn’t about slowing down your instruction or making learning less effective. In fact it can help your students recharge and re-engage and ultimately improve learning over time.
[Slide 10]
While there’s extensive research that describes ways that you can re-energize your mind and your focus, I’m just going to touch on three distinct areas that are well supported to make the case for you that pausing in different ways during the school day is actually critical for learning. Obviously, this is not a complete list of research that supports these ideas, but I’m just touching on a few to give you an idea of how pausing during instruction can help your students. The first is for an improvement in focus. One study with the perfectly named title that starts with “Boost Your Brain While Having a Break” saw that physical exertion combined with cognitive engagement improved student performance, especially in math. And in general, that study cited many other previous studies that showed that physical activity of any kind benefited a student’s cognitive function. The second is an improvement in memory. A report in the publication Current Biology discussed this idea. It described that especially during tasks where there was a complicated, steep learning curve, they saw that there was significant improvements in performance between breaks that included periods of rest. And the last is decreasing fatigue. Now this particular study that I’m talking about was a Danish study but there are several more that also support the same idea, and of course these ideas apply across countries. This study discussed two important ideas. The first is that they noticed that students’ performance on standardized tests actually declined the later in the day it was. However they found that introducing breaks of up to 20 or 30 minutes during these standardized tests in the afternoon would actually improve performance. This indicated to them that short periods of rest could decrease fatigue in students and improve their academic performance. So while I’ve only shared with you three studies, I’m hoping you can start to see how making time for intentional pauses during your instruction, even in different ways, can improve your students’ performance. Next we’re just going to talk about how these ideas relate to brain breaks in your classroom and some very simple strategies you can consider for the future.
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There’s one last bit of research that I’d like to share with you. This is related to memory, and how our brains process new information we learn. A theory called the consolidation theory, first introduced in 1900 describes how sleep is required for memories to be consolidated in order to be remembered and better recalled. This means that the act of sleeping actually helps you process and remember information better than if you did not set aside time for a good night’s sleep. During sleep, memories are transferred into different parts of the brain. That transfer helps in longer-term storage. More recently, within the past few decades, our understanding of how sleep can improve learning and memory actually extends to rest as well. It seems that even allowing our brains to rest, without fully falling asleep, also promotes improvement in memory storage. So all of these ideas I have just shared with you help to emphasize the importance of brain breaks, and how, when incorporating brain breaks on a consistent basis, we can give our students’ brains time to process and organize information they have just learned.
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So when we talk about brain breaks, all we’re saying is that it is a short and intentional pause during instruction. This doesn’t have to be a long time period. Although I just cited a study that discussed a 20 or 30-minute break, many other studies show the benefits of even much shorter brain breaks. Depending on the context in your classroom, what you want to do is just design a break to allow students to just take a moment to disengage from your lesson, especially when the tasks are very difficult. You’ll see that this will actually improve their learning over time and even do things like reduce stress. I think sometimes teachers might worry that creating these pauses in a class will result in lost instructional time or just give students a free pass to have a free period. That’s really not true. You’re not making a random or unplanned activity and you’re not allowing your classroom to devolve but with brain breaks you are intentionally creating times in your instruction where you can allow students to take a moment to recharge. This is very intentional.
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As you probably have experienced in your classroom from time to time, there’s sometimes a lot of pressure to make any type of breaks educational. In fact sometimes there’s even arguments for utilizing all of your instructional time to ensure that it’s matching your classroom objective. Of course we don’t want to derail our class. We don’t want unintentional breaks but a true brain break has benefits of actually improving learning over time. Taking these few moments to pause without being connected to educational content can be a huge benefit to your students, and so you don’t always have to have a strong connection to content during these brain breaks. So while you may want to use a break for something like a content-related game or maybe a vocabulary activity or a discussion question, these are all really great activities you can add into your classroom routines; you really don’t have to worry about that. Those things have their place but brain breaks are completely separate. Instead, you want to be thinking of things like a quick breathing exercise or some kind of physical activity. They work because they’re asking nothing of your students’ brains, which allows them time to rest and recover before they dig back into the really engaging work that you have planned. While you may do something like give students time to reflect on what they learn, you don’t want to be deeply engaging them or really stressing their brains by completing a complex cognitive task.
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Now while the course that this webinar is referencing discusses nine brain breaks, we’re going to just briefly touch on three that you can hopefully consider as a very easy way to implement during rigorous classroom activities. That way you can leave this webinar ready to go with a simple idea you can try out in your classroom. We’ll delve into each of these in just a touch more detail. The three we’re going to discuss are: Deep breathing Movement breaks Artistic expression
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So Deep Breathing Exercises can include something like guided breathing activities, for example, belly breathing or box breathing. In box breathing you instruct students to: Inhale their breath for four seconds, then hold it for four seconds, Exhale for four seconds, and then hold it again for four seconds Then you repeat this process. I think an exercise like this is especially helpful for students who are getting very frustrated or stressed during a really difficult activity, or maybe even students who are just anxious or worried. For example during a really difficult test period, you can start by guiding them through these activities and teaching them times when they can even do this themselves if they need a few moments to just recharge. Really this kind of skill is a life skill too because I think we can all agree that there have been times when we are overwhelmed and just taking a few minutes to take some deep breaths and recharge has really helped us. And something like deep breathing doesn’t need to be long at all. You can accomplish this in as little as one or two minutes before getting back to your activity. So as a quick example, just consider a class of students that are about to take a big math test, maybe it’s something like the final exam. You can really feel the tension in the room and students are really really nervous about completing this. Maybe during finals week they have just been bombarded with back-to-back tests and this is the last test of the day. That might prompt you to tell students before they even start that they’re going to take a few minutes to reset. You’re guiding them through box breathing. Maybe you’re dimming the lights at the same time and you’re giving a few minutes for them to reset. Later as the students are taking the test, you might notice a student that seems to be in distress. You could walk up to that student and say, “Let’s practice that box breathing for a few minutes to give your brain a chance to rest before you move on to your test.” You’re likely gonna find that your students are a little bit calmer if they engage in something like this. Just in general if they’re familiar with these kinds of breaks on a regular basis, you’ll be teaching them strategies to reset on their own as well.
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The second really simple brain break for you is a movement break. This can be something like a quick physical activity where they follow along with your instructions, like completing jumping jacks at a certain tempo, or marching in place, completing a quick Simon Says activity. or even a free-form dance break. You might consider something like this if you know that your students tend to get a bit lethargic at certain points in your day or during certain complex topics that you are teaching. It can actually also have a similar effect for very overly energetic classes as well as a way to get their wiggles out. Again, this doesn’t need to be a long time. Maybe a couple of minutes; between three and five minutes is sufficient. So now consider this example. Perhaps this time it’s the middle of the morning in a first-grade classroom and the class has been sitting through a phonics lesson for 20 or 30 minutes already. You notice that a few students are slumped over in their chairs, one is tapping his pencil, and a couple of other students are starting to poke at each other and disrupt the class. You tell the kids, “Okay freeze friends, it’s Simon Says time!” Now because you incorporate a brain break like this on a regular basis, your students know exactly what to do. You start saying things like “Simon Says march in place,” “Simon Says touch your nose,” or “Simon Says clap three times.” You spend maybe three to five minutes on this activity. Now, luckily for you, you have very strong classroom management routines and of course, we don’t have time today to discuss A behavior management plan as well, but if you’ve been establishing this routine throughout your year, you might end the movement break by saying something like “Simon says sit back down and show me listening eyes.”
[Slide 24]
The last brain break we’re going to discuss is artistic expression and I think that this is a great brain break for those of you that might be a little uncomfortable with this idea at first and worried that you’re not filling your instructional time with content aligned with your objective. For Artistic Expression if you’d like you can ask students to reflect on what they learn so far and do something like draw a picture. So you can incorporate artistic expression into something related to your lesson if you feel the need, for example asking your students to draw a picture of what they just learned. Or you can open it up even more and not tie it to your lesson at all. You can ask them to simply draw a feeling or complete a coloring sheet or maybe participate in a small craft. It can just be another way of providing students with a calming break when they’re feeling a little bit overwhelmed or when the lesson is becoming too intense. I think breaks like this as well are really great for children who become overly stimulated or anxious and need some kind of calming break that’s still very directed towards an end goal. So now let’s just consider this last example and let’s say that now it’s a seventh-grade science class and they’ve just finished 30 minutes walking through a pretty complex unit on cell structure. And you’re looking around the room and you’re seeing students kind of glassy-eyed and maybe putting their head down and certainly not paying attention fully like you’d like them to. You’ve planned for this because you’ve experienced this in the past; it’s just a lot of information for students to absorb. This class period is towards the end of the day and students are just exhausted at this point. You ask them to close their notes and grab a pencil and just draw. You just tell them all you’re doing is drawing what a cell looks like to you. It doesn’t have to be perfect and I’m not going to grade it. We’re just taking a few minutes for you to just use your artistic ability to draw an interpretation of the cell. And what you notice is that students are re-engaging through the use of this artistic expression brain break. While some kids are sketching actual diagrams of an actual cell, others are just drawing some abstract labels. One is drawing a little city and It really just gives students just enough time to disconnect from the lesson while still being engaged with the content In a very low-stakes way. After five minutes or so you ask students to Put away their work. and then you get back to your lesson.
[Slide 26]
Thinking about planning your brain breaks, you want to make sure that you’re doing this during your lesson planning and not just during the lesson as much as you possibly can. The reason for this is that you want to make sure that everything that you’re doing in your lesson is very intentional and that the brain breaks are actually being used to support your students in taking a needed rest before getting back to your activity. As you’re lesson planning, you can look at your lesson and ask yourself, “Where are the heaviest cognitive loads or where am I asking students to do something incredibly abstract or complex or something new that’s going to be taking an extended period of time?” Then you’re going to be building in those breaks naturally during those time points. Of course too you’ll have experience with your class to know when they start to fade and when they start to need additional breaks and you can intentionally plan for those times in your day as well. For example you’ll naturally most likely plan more brain breaks towards the end of the day when your students are kind of fatigued already from their earlier lessons. So when you’re planning and thinking about brain breaks as you’re doing your lesson planning, there are a few natural integration points you can analyze to see if they’ll fit in there. Just before independent work begins Midway through a long lecture or direct instruction segment During the transition between two different subjects or units Or even just at the very start of your last class of the day, before anything else, because you know how exhausted your students are at that point.
[Slide 28]
So let’s just take a look at how incorporating breaks over multiple hours in your day can look. Now while any grade levels including your high schoolers can and should be using brain breaks, I chose a 4th grade self-contained classroom as my example, so you can more easily see how different break breaks can be incorporated across your day. So let’s say right after lunch, your math block begins at 12:00 pm. You pre-planned a break just before the independent practice because you’re teaching a new concept today. You’re introducing long division and you’re doing some direct instruction and some guided practice with your students, and you know it’s going to be cognitively very challenging for them. Once they receive this instruction and have done a little bit of practice together with you, you do a fun break. It’s 60 seconds of silent disco where basically your students are just dancing to imaginary music before sitting down, and then they’re going to start trying some problems on their own. Later, after that, you’re transitioning to your ELA content area, and they’re going to be reading a new passage today. Before you transition between subjects, your students do a quick breathing exercise together. It only takes about 30 seconds, but you’re using it as a nice transition between subjects to get them ready and reset for their next lesson. Then maybe you’ve got your final class of the day, which is science. Around this time, you know that your students are starting to crash and their energy levels are getting low, and you’re just tired from the whole day. Typically, you always know to incorporate some kind of brain break into science, regardless of whether you feel the content is very challenging for the day or not. In this case, maybe you go ahead and just start science off as normal, but you plan a break A few minutes into instruction, for this one you have a fun activity where you tell them to shake it out. You model for them how to shake out each limb and sequence while counting down from ten to one. Again, it’s just a couple of moments for them to just kind of reset. Because science is the last class of the day and it really is challenging for them to stay focused, your students typically need an additional brain break towards the middle of class, which you’ve also planned for. Today, after a brief lecture on ecosystems, you let students take time to draw a picture. You feel good about this one because it is loosely connected to your content but still allowing your students time to rest and process what they just learned. I hope that you can see from this brief example that brain breaks can be very intentional and can serve as a natural component of your lessons. Whether that’s to help transition your students to a new activity or subject, or whether it’s to intentionally allow students time to process what they just learned before they move into another component of your lesson.
[Slide 30]
Ok so we’re wrapping up our Brain Breaks webinar but I do want to leave you with a thought and that’s to teach your students the purpose of brain breaks early and often. Students aren’t just going to benefit from actually pausing during your lesson activities to participate and engage in a brain break but they’re also going to benefit from understanding why it’s important so that they can model these same behaviors themselves as they continue to grow up. Even if that’s saying something like, “Okay guys, we’ve been working hard for 20 minutes and your brains need a reset. Here’s what we’re going to do and why.” That shifts the thinking in your students to something that communicates its a meaningful practice over time. The hope is that your students will begin to recognize their own fatigue and become aware of when they need their own brain breaks, whether that’s while they’re studying at home by themselves or if they’re frustrated with a certain task and recognize that they need to take a minute to step away.
[Slide 32]
I just want to leave you with three simple actions that you can start incorporating as soon as tomorrow. Choose a break type that fits into your next lesson. Don’t overthink it; just choose something. Then plan the pause in advance and make sure you’re building this into your lesson sequence as you’re planning for your lesson activities. Finally as you’re incorporating the brain break and modeling what to do, explain to your students why it’s important, what the purpose of it is, and how it will help them. And that’s all I have for you all today! Thank you so much for your time and I hope that I’ve convinced you that brain breaks are worth it!
[Slide 34]
[back to Shayna] Thank you Dr. Casey! If you’re interested in learning more about brain breaks, you should go deeper and take a look at our full course. It includes what we call a boost framework, which is a structured and step-by-step planning tool that will walk you through: the decisions you make when you build your brain break type, the objective of your break, the optimal scheduling within your lesson, the setup and materials needed, and the duration of your break It will help give you a repeatable system for building brain breaks into every lesson you teach. You’ll also learn a lot more about why brain breaks should be a part of your classroom and learn additional ideas and strategies for other brain breaks that you can incorporate. You can choose the one-hour quick course for PD clock hours, or our longer credit course, where you will earn 1 semester credit from any of our university partners. If you are interested, you can register for the course at modelteaching.com.
[Slide 35]
That’s all the time that we have today, but if you have a question about today’s webinar feel free to email us anytime at courses@modelteaching.com. This marks the end of this Model Teaching Spotlight webinar. Make sure to sign up for our upcoming webinar: On Wednesday, May 20th You can go to our News and Events page at modelteaching.com to register. Thank you again for joining us, and enjoy the rest of your week!
