Somehow, knowing others have found a pathway of healing and resilience after disaster gives me the energy I need to rise out of these current circumstances and forge forward with our students in my wake, carried on by the force of my will and a toolkit of good evidence-based strategies.
Instead of thinking about what we are not teaching, let’s take this opportunity to focus on what is truly important in our subjects and endeavor to teach it in ways that make it durable, usable and flexible in the minds of our students.
In 2021, the challenge of returning to school from winter break feels magnified. So what insights from Mind, Brain, and Education Science can I use to help make this critical point of a unique school year go well?
Memory, like all brain functions, is not isolated to one region of the brain—and without it, learning does not happen. What follows is how we have translated research on memory to our respective disciplines, science and history.
I challenge each educator to remind students that they have the autonomy to voice whatever is on their mind because their perspective is valued and needed.
By releasing myself from being a “sage on the stage” to become a co-creator of educational opportunities with my students, everyone in my classroom is a better teacher and stronger learner.
The Responsive Classroom approach reaches far beyond the old perception of social and emotional curriculums producing “nice” kids in a warm and fuzzy environment. It allows us to build intelligent guidelines for school and to develop classroom practices that are informed by current neuroscience and are relevant to the children of the 21st Century.
Changing a schedule is a large scale effort. What was I doing on a smaller scale in my physics class to combine rigor and well-being, strategies that could be done by any teacher without asking permission?
There are two integral questions that teachers often overlook but need to ask themselves as they head into the school year: how do I want my classroom to feel and what steps can I take to create this feeling in my learning space?
Like Indiana Jones in his search for the Holy Grail, we all have been looking for the right hardware and software for both our current and future school experiences. We'll show you how to do it in this blog, and also in our newest professional development resource for teachers.