Rating: 
Summary: Great Book for future Professors, and Trainers
Review: Being a Trainer myself.I highly recommend this book as a resource for learning new tools for beginning trainers. I bought while I was at Trainers Training at Idea Seminars with Rex Sikes. I learned more techniques and exercises from this book than any other Trainers book out there. Useful for creating seminars, training and computer courses.
Rating:
Summary: A must have book for beginning teachers.
Review: Excellent examples and lists to use the next day in class. A very practical and meaningful source of information for teachers. If you want to start teaching for learning, this is the book to get you there and you'll have fun doing it. As well as your students!
Rating:
Summary: From concept to application - it's all here!
Review: I am trying to figure out how to get to Jensen's six-day workshop this July. If the money cooperates (that is, I can get my district to part with it), I'll be there. So many of his conclusions and recommendations are dear to my heart, and it's exciting to have them backed up by brain research. Perhaps now all the mechanically-minded, linear, input/output drones will have to listen up. If you think enthusiasm, creativity, and positive adult/child relationships are the keys to good teaching, get this book! If you think bribery, rote memorization, and competition get the job done, don't bother.
Rating: 
Summary: Just another stupid educational fad
Review: It is an unfortunate tendency of people who review books to use any and every error in a book as an excuse for bashing the book, so I have to stop and make sure that I am not falling into that trap. Yet this book is truly awful: it has, literally, hundreds of grammatical and stylistic errors, and there is probably not a page that doesn't have some type of error. Here's just one of the innumerable examples, which contains an error in punctuation and grammar: "The brain sits in a state of stress; and the learner's self-esteem, confidence, and peer acceptance is at stake," (p. 300). What is more astounding about the horrible state of the text is that this is the "revised" edition of the text, which makes one wonder what the first edition was like. All the errors--which, by the way, a high school freshman should know how to correct--make me wonder about the integrity of Jensen's knowledge of the science of the brain--how careful a scholar is he likely to be, when he shows so little familiarity with standards in scholarship? On page 186, for example, he claims that if you look up and to the left, you will have superior access to stored pictures in your brain, while if you look downward and to the right, you're experiencing feelings. Up and to the right is where your eyes go to create new images, he claims. Yeah, right. In another book of his, he claims that students are taking Nimidopine as a memory drug, a statement that has to be absolutely false. What else can one expect from him when in a list of people who have made great contributions to the world he lists, between Steven Hawking and Mother Teresa, Eddie Murphy? That he is very popular among educators and is giving teacher in-services across the country is truly troubling.
Rating:
Summary: The sine qua non of brain-based learning
Review: Just in four years, you already have a much revised new edition! That reflects the pace of the explosion of brain research studies. The outdated Triune Brain Theory is no longer mentioned. We have: new insights on the dynamic interplay of both nature and nurture; stages of learning that responds to the crucial question of "When has a student learned something?"... For the serious student of neuroscience applied to learning, this is one of the best books. It contains so much interesting, useful and up-to-date information. Just look through the detailed Table of Contents. Rewards, motivation, creativity, meaning-making, discipline... are all seen in a new perspective. It gives a biological basis to respecting individual differences and learning styles. This new edition, with additional drawings, illustrations, outlines, tips and boxes of key ideas, makes the book attractive and easier to read. The author is gifted in integrating a lot of research studies and making them relevant and palatable. He has done a great service to all educators and learners. (The first edition is still worth keeping. It contains useful book recommendations for follow-up and other valid materials that have been left out in the revised edition.)
Rating:
Summary: The sine qua non of brain-based learning
Review: Just in four years, you already have a much revised new edition! That reflects the pace of the explosion of brain research studies. The outdated Triune Brain Theory is no longer mentioned. We have: new insights on the dynamic interplay of both nature and nurture; stages of learning that responds to the crucial question of "When has a student learned something?"... For the serious student of neuroscience applied to learning, this is one of the best books. It contains so much interesting, useful and up-to-date information. Just look through the detailed Table of Contents. Rewards, motivation, creativity, meaning-making, discipline... are all seen in a new perspective. It gives a biological basis to respecting individual differences and learning styles. This new edition, with additional drawings, illustrations, outlines, tips and boxes of key ideas, makes the book attractive and easier to read. The author is gifted in integrating a lot of research studies and making them relevant and palatable. He has done a great service to all educators and learners. (The first edition is still worth keeping. It contains useful book recommendations for follow-up and other valid materials that have been left out in the revised edition.)
Rating:
Summary: Well-Researched, easy to read, practical
Review: Mr. Jensen has saved me and other teachers the time of gathering together the latest information about the brain, learning and so much more! He has made all this scholarly research accessible and fun to read. I wish the deadwood at my school would at least read this book but I hope they would also use the great ideas in it, too, for the students' sake!
Rating: 
Summary: It Rises above the "Fluff" Books
Review: The first thing that struck me was that it was easy to read. The print was readable and the illustrations were helpful. I did also find some grammatical errors as an earlier review said. But mostly it was very specific and practical. The chapters most helpful were on "emotional states" and music. It's hard to find a book on this subject that's across the board, dealing with many different issues and this one addresses nearly every brain-related research issue from nutrition to memory. As a scientist who also works with high school students, I found his translation of brain research into the classroom to be thoughtful, if not enthusiastic. It's a tough subject to translate, but I did get more than I thought I would out of the book. Mostly it helped me get past the hype and get into the real practical meat of the material. The book's far from perfect, but it's the best I've seen so far on this topic.
Rating:
Summary: Do not rely on Jenson's knowlege of science
Review: There are two kinds of error in this book, the obvious, and the subtle. The first obvious error is on page 28, chapter 3, when glia and interneurons are said to be the same thing; they're just not. "Interneuron" is another term for association neurons, which carry electrical impulses like all other neurons, something glia do not do. The first subtle error is on page 11, chapter 2, when Jenson offers a bar graph comparing relative amounts of brain cells in humans, monkeys, mice and fruit flies. Of course smaller animals have fewer brain cells than bigger animals, they have smaller numbers of ALL kinds of cells because they are so small. Why would you compare the number of brain cells in a fruit fly with a human?! At least a hundred fruit fly BODIES could fit in a human brain! Why not show a bar graph comparing the percentage of brain cells for each organism?! I confess I quit reading the book fairly early in, especially when I noticed the same set of inane "reflection questions" (like, "What from this chapter was new to you?") had been reprinted, word-for-word, at the end of each and every chapter.
Rating:
Summary: Do not rely on Jenson's knowlege of science
Review: There are two kinds of error in this book, the obvious, and the subtle. The first obvious error is on page 28, chapter 3, when glia and interneurons are said to be the same thing; they're just not. "Interneuron" is another term for association neurons, which carry electrical impulses like all other neurons, something glia do not do. The first subtle error is on page 11, chapter 2, when Jenson offers a bar graph comparing relative amounts of brain cells in humans, monkeys, mice and fruit flies. Of course smaller animals have fewer brain cells than bigger animals, they have smaller numbers of ALL kinds of cells because they are so small. Why would you compare the number of brain cells in a fruit fly with a human?! At least a hundred fruit fly BODIES could fit in a human brain! Why not show a bar graph comparing the percentage of brain cells for each organism?! I confess I quit reading the book fairly early in, especially when I noticed the same set of inane "reflection questions" (like, "What from this chapter was new to you?") had been reprinted, word-for-word, at the end of each and every chapter.
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