Entries by Eric Jensen

Stress, Budgets and Job Cuts

Stressed? Learn From the Zebra! Learn How You Can Cope in a World Packed with Unpredictability In every city and state I visit lately, there’s the smell of something burning in the air. No, it’s not the usual summer brush fires. It’s the slashing and burning of city, county, state and federal budgets. It is […]

90 Second “Kids From Poverty” Quiz

Take This 90 Second “Kids From Poverty” Quiz and Decide if You Should Be “Upgrading” Your TITLE 1 Classroom Skill Set in July Before you begin, grab something to record your answers with. Go ahead and get out paper… Are you ready? 1. How much of student achievement in kids from poverty is correlated with […]

Can We Raise Test Scores (Again)?

Let’s explore how you can boost test scores by making small interventions and simple changes at the last moment. First, a simple disclaimer: I don’t support 95% of all the testing being done on kids. I love accountability, but not crazy-making testing that gives self-serving data; data that helps you do better on the next […]

New Research on Stress; Why You Should Finally Take Charge of It… Now

Stress is real; it’s the body’s response. It’s what you feel. But it’s only the response to a perception. The perception could be real or imagined. But it’s always the perception of loss of control over an adverse situation or person. In other words, the stress you experience is always about how you deal with life.

There are no stressful jobs, no stressful people and certainly no stressful classrooms. But there are teachers who experience stress in their dealings with those issues. If you think the stress is “out there,” you’ll always be miserable. Why? The world “out there” will never change.

A New Insight to the Brain and Nutrition Puzzle

Is your school cafeteria helping or hurting your kid’s academic performance? Many who are still unwilling to read the research claim that what you eat doesn’t matter very much. They are wrong. Many early studies were not done with a strong experimental protocol or they were done on malnourished kids. But more recent ones have used the “gold standard” in research (blind studies, large sample sizes, cross-over design) and they have found that school nutrition does matter.

The Chinese Tiger Mother – The Debate

The Wall Street Journal published Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior and touched off a passionate debate on the topic of parenting. Amy Chua, a professor at Yale Law School and author of the book “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” shares her story on how she raised her children. “Western parents try to respect their […]

Can Brain Research Help Educators?

This question above is highly relevant to all educators. Brain-based teaching is the active engagement of practical strategies based on principles derived from brain related sciences.

All teachers use strategies; the difference here is that you’re using strategies based on real science, not rumor or mythology. But the strategies ought to be generated by verifiable, established principles.

Ouch! Does Pain Change The Brain?

For some of us, it’s a deep secret.

We ache, we suffer and spend part of our lives full of misery. We know that all of us, our students and ourselves, experience pain. Whether it’s a headache, or more serious back, leg or shoulder pain, we feel miserable when we hurt. While temporary pain is one thing to our body and brain, chronic pain is a whole different entity. I’d guess you know that the pain we feel is a result of the signaling processing in our brains as much as or more than the signaling from site of the injury in our body. Why is this relevant? Why should you care about chronic pain as an educator?

10 Critical Things You Should Know About Brain Based Education

October 2010 Leaders of Learners – Eric Jensen article published. Texas ASCD. The brain is involved in everything we do and it takes many approaches to understand it better. Brain-based education has withstood the test of time and an accumulating body of empirical and experiental evidence confirms the validity of the new paradigm. Many educationally […]