THE HABITS OF MIND AND THE BRAIN GYM FOR ENHANCEMENT OF TEACHERS’ COMMUNICATIVE-TEACHING COMPETENCE

Abstract

The hints offered both by Neuroeducation research and by the theories on the mind, within the national scientific debate, encourage reflection on possible ways of implementing the teaching / learning process. Communicative teaching approaches such the Brain-based ones, with particular reference to ‘Brain-gym’ (Mac Lean, 1975, Dennison, 2010) and educational activities aimed at developing the Habits of Mind (Costa & Kallick, 2008) are the keynotes of the present research, carried out with 385 secondary school teachers working in the province of Caltanissetta during the school year 2020/2021. Through the research process we wanted to verify the validity of the Brain-based model in order to enhance didactic communication reinforcing teachers’ linguistic-pragmatic skill and communicative-teaching competence.