Treat (no trick!) for October. Something complimentary and valuable.

Every now and then I do a survey. For example, five months ago we did a survey to find out what you thought about lesson planning. Two great things came from the survey. First, we learned a great deal from your thoughtful comments. We used your comments to put together something amazing for each of you. Therefore, the second goodie is that, although only one person (Ginna Myers) won the grand prize, everyone has won something of great value.

In fact, it might be the single most important gift I could ever give you… and it’s FREE (free is good)!

RESEARCH:

For years, I have pushed a more thoughtful approach to teaching that combines the power of emotions, movement, music and the development of cognitive capacity. But the challenge to use a more brain-based approach is in the proper planning, sequencing and execution of the processes.

Why is this planning so important?

If you’re doing the wrong thing in teaching, kids lose out and either they don’t change or they change for the worse. Kids can change more quickly than you ever thought. A recent study at the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive Thinking by Dr. Draganski and colleagues stated, “…we demonstrate significant gray matter volume increases in frontal and parietal brain areas following only two sessions of practice…” (Taubert, et al. 2010).

This is crazy good!

This stunning discovery that our brain can actually change its shape within days or weeks in response to certain mental and physical stimuli is dramatically different from the “old school” fixed mindset that change happened after months or years (or, not at all.) We now know that just doing complex thinking can literally add gray mass to the brain (Aydin, K., et al. 2007). But how do we get kids to be doing the complex thinking required for high performance learning? Read more

Getting Priorities Right

What should your priorities be this year? From a personal standpoint, managing your health through good food, exercise, and stress management are pretty smart paths to follow. After all, if you’re not at your best, both you and your students miss out.

From a professional standpoint, ensuring that students become strong learners should be a top priority.

Since you don’t have time for every idea on earth, what factors will support your student’s growth the most? For now, we’ll focus on just one of the top five factors that drive student achievement. The study we draw from is grounded in work from several thousand teachers, so the sample size is impressive.

Focusing on what matters most is one sure way to “disaster-proof” your teaching.

PART ONE: Research

A human being is born less able to cope on its own than any other mammal. However, this provides the brain with extraordinary flexibility to adapt to its environment. The method it uses is a monster’s appetite for environmental adaption based on experience. Yet, I’ve always said that our brain is primarily a “gist processor.” That means that we are more interested in being effective (goal acquisition) than we are being efficient, being a deep thinker, or knowing a lot of background. In the classroom, this means that most kids (unless we shape their brains differently) would much rather get quirky headlines, YouTube clips, and do activities all day.

To become effective, the brain relies on an exquisite collection of feedback processors. Read more

Myth-Busters: “It’s not what you don’t know that concerns me. It’s what you know that is not true that concerns me.”

Let’s start off on the right foot and destroy a myth.

Myth: IQ Cannot Be Changed… Students are Fixed the Way They Are

Completely false! Brains can change! In fact, the worse students are academically, the greater the upside. There are no credible studies (yet) of raising IQ in kids with high IQ already. But many, many studies show that kids with an IQ in the 70-100 range can have it raised. In study after study, we find that every single component of intelligence can be raised.

In one study (Mackey, et al., 2011) children aged 7 to 9 from poverty participated in one of two cognitive training programs for 60 minutes/day and 2 days/week, for a total of 8 weeks. Children in the reasoning group improved substantially (an average increase of 10 points in Performance IQ.) By contrast, children in the speed group improved substantially in different areas. Counter to widespread mythology, these results indicate that both fluid reasoning and processing speed are modifiable by purposeful training.

What about kids from poverty; can you raise their IQ? Yes, you can. In fact, among the poor, the heritability of IQ is far less than among middle and upper income students. The heritability of IQ among kids from low-income families from their parents is less than 10%. It’s over 60% for middle and upper income families. In other words, don’t blame the parents for a poor child’s low school performance. Before age four, the caregivers ARE the dominant influence. But once in kindergarten, school is the dominant influence.

Kids will spend nearly 13,000 hours in school from K-12. This means the IQ of the parents of poor kids is less of a factor than the environment you create at school. That’s right; it means your staff has NO excuses for students to underperform. Read more

Eric Jensen Shares His Thoughts On Motivation and Education

Eric Jensen was asked how to for his perspective on motivation in the classroom… his answer is found in the video below.

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 common to hear of 5-15% of staff being given the dreaded equivalent of the “You’re fired, here’s your pink slip”. The stress levels are off the charts and there’s anger, denial and resentment. If this applies to you or your colleagues, lean in and read closely. If it does not apply to you today, it may apply in the near future.

Usually this newsletter is for teaching tips. For the next couple of months, let’s take the opportunity to look after you. There are some very brain-smart coping strategies to help you and your colleagues deal with these issues. One of them comes from a zebra.

The others are…

Understanding Stress

Most teachers define stress as, “I’m not exactly sure what it is, but I know when it happens and what it feels like.” Stress researchers define it as a mind and body reaction to adverse stimuli resulting from a perception of a loss of control (Kim and Diamond 2002). This suggests that stress embodies both the stimulus and the resulting reaction in our body.

In short, the stress in our life is not “out there.” There are no stressful jobs, no stressful people, nor any stressful situations. There is a very real response in you. But if you tell yourself a job is stressful or a person is stressful, your life will always be miserable. You have more “say-so” over your life than you think.

There are typically three ways we feel stress: the good stress (e.g. excitement, challenge, novelty), the intense stress known as acute (which is draining or even traumatic) and the ongoing and unforgiving stress known as chronic. The last two categories of stress are evil for the brain.

Why is that? Read more

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 test, instead of in real life where the tests should be targeting. Having said that, things are what they are. Let’s focus on the here and now.

Here is a plan that will help you maximize testing for your students.

Research: Recent Discovery on Testing

You have only five variables you can tweak in the days, hours and minutes before the actual test time. The biggest variable is how well kids have learned what will be on the test. If you haven’t taken care of that variable all year long, you have fewer options. It’s too late to add much content when you get real close to test time.

The single best thing you can do in the weeks and days before the testing is…have students take tests. Testing produced better overall recall than did restudying (Roediger and Karpicke, 2006). Give them small chunks of “mock tests” that will mimic the real ones. But the research gets a bit more complicated from here out.

What about getting feedback on the mock tests?

When tests are NOT accompanied by feedback, some items (i.e., those that were not correctly retrieved) might not benefit from testing (Pashler et al., 2005).

This tells you feedback has two sides: if you get it wrong, you NEED feedback. If it’s right, it’s less important to get feedback.

The debriefing should begin as a social event with the teacher and classmates involved. Then shift it to a personal assignment. Let students improve their “mock” test cores with a reflective test analysis. Here, students write about each question they got wrong: 1) what was their approach, 2) how they came up with the wrong answer, and 3) what they would do differently next time. Give students partial credit for each debriefed corrected answer. This empowers students by helping them become more thoughtful tests takers and reduces their stress by putting more of the process in their control.

Read carefully to what a team of cognitive psychologists says;

“Information that has been tested will be remembered better over time than information that has been restudied. This test-induced benefit is apparently stronger when repeated tests over the same information are provided. These results suggest that tests should be utilized often in educational contexts to maximize retention of information over long time periods.” (Carpenter, et al., 2008, page 446).

Encourage (even mandate) the asking of questions in the weeks and days leading up to the test. Students who are struggling academically are rarely asking the most questions in class. Researchers have found that low-achieving students are often the most reluctant to seek assistance and that a negative or fearful perception of “help seeking” is to blame (Ryan, et al. 1998).

The Ryan study involved 500 students and 25 teachers in 63 sixth-grade math classes throughout 10 Michigan middle schools. The researchers found that low-achieving students tend to perceive question asking as a sign of inability and associate it with feeling “dumb.” Conversely, high achievers with greater confidence are less likely to worry about what others think and tend to focus on the benefits of seeking help, notes the study.

Advise learners to take inventory of their projected goals, time-management skills, and study habits; and to reorganize them appropriately. Students who give their academic concerns top priority and allow ample time for studying (including exam preparation) often perform best (Yaworski, 1998). If help is needed in establishing a personal study schedule, or if chronic procrastination persists, encourage learners to seek the advice of a guidance counselor or related professional.

Next, in the days coming up to the testing, students often get stressed (the teachers are, of course, totally relaxed!)

The three best ways to get kids more relaxed are each about control (it’s the counterbalance to stress.) First, help them take more control over the process of making choices for when, what type of, and where to prepare. (You pre-select the options.) For example, let them choose which content sections they want to prep for first. Second, teach them self-regulation strategies such as slow deep breathing to relax. Third, teach them how to reframe the testing experience, to help them be more in charge of it. Tell your students, “Tests are a school’s way to assess their schooling success. We want to find out what we’re doing well and what we need to do differently. The tests tell us what changes we can make to develop your brain as best as possible.” Read more

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

What’s more personal these days than stress?

Whether it’s stress in your students, stress in your own family or life, it seems that it’s on the rise.  You might be feeling the twinge from job insecurity, school testing, your health, your parent’s health, or issues with your own kids.

None of this sounds good. But, what does stress REALLY do to your body and your brain?

First, let’s get something squared away. 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.

But your brain is malleable; you’ve heard me say that for years. If you allow yourself to experience life as highly stressful, your brain will adapt to that higher stress load. It’s called “allostasis”; the word means “adjusted stability.” Your brain literally resets its own stress thermostat, so a higher stress load becomes the “new norm.” Examples of a “new norm” are depression, general anxiety disorder, PTSD, and chronic stress disorders. Bruce McEwen from Rockefeller University is a pioneer in this field.

Why should you care about all this science? Why care about allostasis and chronic aging? We’ll get to that in a moment. Read more

A New Insight to the Brain and Nutrition Puzzle

Why You Might be Losing Your Mind

Recent Discovery

Is there anything new in nutrition that you haven’t already  heard? This week I listened to a neuroscientist talk about the research on glucose and the brain. It’s possible your school cafeteria is hurting your kid’s academic performance. It’s also possible your own brain is in trouble. How? Many who are unwilling to read the research claim that what you eat doesn’t matter very much. They are wrong.

Let’s take the simple (ha!) subject of sugar and your brain.

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.

Here’s what I learned that was new…

Read more

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 children’s individuality, encouraging them to pursue their true passions, supporting their choices, and providing positive reinforcement and a nurturing environment. By contrast, the Chinese believe that the best way to protect their children is by preparing them for the future, letting them see what they’re capable of, and arming them with skills, work habits and inner confidence that no one can ever take away.”

From the survey the Wall Street Journal did on the subject, you can see that readers are 2-1 in favor of the Eastern style of parenting…

Tou may want to read the InsidetheSchool.com article A Response to the Chinese Tiger Mother: Children Need a Balanced Approach where Lori Desautels, Ph.D. notes:

Although the math and science scores are lower in the United States than in many Asian countries, a recent international study reported that “Chinese children as young as six are suffering from serious stress at school, according to the international study, which shines a light onto the pressures faced by Chinese youngsters being pushed to take advantage of the opportunities of the ‘new’ China.

“A scientific survey of 9 to 12-year-olds in eastern China found that more than 80 percent worried “a lot” about exams, two-thirds feared punishment by their teachers and almost three-quarters reported fearing physical punishment from their parents.”[3]

There is always a trade off and balancing mechanism in place when we consciously or subconsciously move to one extreme or the other in any area of life. When we push our children and students to strive academically neglecting the emotional intelligence of self-awareness, empathy and social connectedness, there are often times negative consequences within the social and emotional constructs of social and emotional growth. And if we do not set high expectations and place rigor and meaningful content and differentiated instruction into our curriculum, we may see apathetic students who do not embrace the importance and significance of educational learning, expansion and inquiry!

I think we all know that Western parenting could use a tune-up, and Amy’s book may have created a new discussion… although our first reaction is to defend the way we raise our children, it’s a topic that needs attention.

Feel free to share your thoughts on her approach.

Can Brain Research Help Educators?

Is there evidence that brain research can 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. Read more