For most educators, stress levels slowly ramp up over the first couple of months of school. The word on the street is many of you already feel like you’ve gone from 0 to 60 on a stress-o-meter!
Yes, this school year brings unprecedented challenges. Every September we help you rise to the challenge. This post’s self-care issue might be the most important ever because … Read more
We have all begun a new calendar year. For some, there is already stress and more of the same challenges from last year. But this post has answers for you. This is all about using something FREE to help your brain in the decision-making process. It works for you, your colleagues, your family and your students.
By the way, over a year’s time, what is it worth to you to make just ONE better decision a day? Read more
With countless teens struggling in school, the stakes are higher than every before.
Turnaround Tools for the Teenage Brain offers teachers research-based and classroom-tested strategies that prove every student (no matter what their past experience) can learn and succeed, if you know how to do it. This new book shows you how to do.
Education experts Eric Jensen and Carole Snider reveal one powerful tool after another to help teachers, parents and support staff be the real difference-makers in their student’s lives. Drawing on cutting-edge science, this breakthrough book outlines the core mindsets and actionable strategies that are needed to increase student effort, build attitudes, and improve behaviors.
Step by step, teachers can learn how to tap into a student’s internal motivation to help them become determined learners. The authors also offer guidelines on how and when to use “workarounds” or lasting interventions that rely on the “rules” of how the brain changes. In addition, the authors include vital information on the role of nutrition, exercise, and life balance on academic achievement.
From the very first chapter, to the final page, you’ll find solutions to many of your toughest challenges so they can become become excited, lifelong learners.
Praise for Turnaround Tools for the Teenage Brain
“I highly recommend this book for all secondary educators. Jensen and Snider have written a teacher-friendly book filled with proactive strategies to reclaim struggling students.” —Dr. Sheryl Feinstein, Department Chair, Education, Augustana College, Sioux Falls, SD; author, Secrets of the Teenage Brain
The Authors
Eric Jensen, CEO of Jensen Learning, is a former teacher and cofounder of SuperCamp, the nation’s most innovative and largest academic enrichment program. He is the author of numerous popular books about teaching and brain-based education, including Teaching With Poverty in Mind (ASCD) and Enriching the Brain (Jossey-Bass).
Carole Snider is a former teacher and school counselor. She serves on the state governing board for Ohio school counselors, is an adjunct professor, and recently authored the graduate course, Succeeding with Students of Poverty.
This book clearly shows you how to succeed with teens. Research, background and classroom-tested strategies you can use immediately.
This is the book that gives you immediate tools, right away.
164 pages of inspiring ideas, inspiring stories and focused strategies.
You can purchase the book at Amazon by clicking here. Kindle version available now.
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
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 significant, even profound, brain-based discoveries have occurred in recent years such as neurogenesis, the production of new neurons in the human brain. It is highly likely that these discoveries would have been ignored if the education profession hadn’t been primed, alerted, and actively monitoring cognitive neuroscience research and contemplating its implications and applications.
Let’s start this discussion with a simple, but essential, premise: the brain is intimately involved in and connected with everything educators and students do at school. Any disconnect is a recipe for frustration and potentially disaster. Brain-based education is best understood in three words: engagement, strategies, and principles. Here you will learn the principles of how the synergy of biology, cognitive science, and education can support better education with direct application to schools. Here are some of the powerful connections for educators to make in our new understanding of the new brain-based paradigm.
One
1. Highly relevant is the recent discovery that the human brain can and does grow new neurons. Many survive and become functional. Now we now know that new neurons are highly correlated with memory, mood, and learning. Of interest to educators is that this process can be regulated by our everyday behaviors, which include exercise, lowering stress, and nutrition. Schools can and should influence these variables. This discovery came straight from neuroscientists Gerd Kempermann and Fred Gage. Practical school application: support more – not less – physical activity, recess, and classroom movement.
Today, as a result of years of work by brain-based educators, educators are a far more informed profession. They are more professional, they look more at research, and they are increasingly more capable of understanding and incorporating new cognitive neuroscience discoveries than they were 10 years ago.
More schools of education are incorporating knowledge from the brain sciences than would have done so if we had followed the critics’ advice and crawled into an intellectual cave for 25 years. Many forward thinkers have stayed tuned to such sources as Bob Sylwester’s monthly column in Brain Connection, Scientific Learning’s Internet journal that’s regularly read by thousands of educators and parents. Sylwester, formerly a professor at the University of Oregon and a widely published authority on brain-based education, has been “connecting the dots” for educators for a decade.
10 years after the mudslinging criticism of brain-based education, it’s appropriate to say, “We were right.”
In fact, because of the efforts of the brain-based community to inform educators, thousands are currently using this knowledge appropriately to enhance education policy and practice. There are degree programs in it, scientific journals, and conferences; and peer-reviewed brain-related research now supports the discipline.
There are countless neuroscientists who support the movement, and they demonstrate their support by writing and speaking at educational conferences.
As an author in the brain-based movement, I have reminded educators that they should never say, “Brain research proves . . .” because it does not prove anything.
It may, however, suggest or strengthen the value of a particular pathway.
What educators should say is, “These studies suggest that XYZ may be true about the brain. Given that insight, it probably makes sense for us, under these conditions, to use the following strategies in schools.” This approach, which is a cautionary one, sticks with the truth. When one is careful about making causal claims, the connections are there for those with an open mind.
The science may come from a wide range of disciplines. Brain-based education is not a panacea or magic bullet to solve all of education’s problems. Anyone who claims that is misleading people. It is not yet a program, a model, or a package for schools to follow.
The discussion of how to improve student learning must widen from axons and dendrites to the bigger picture. That bigger picture is that our brain is involved with everything we do at school. The brain is the most relevant feature to explore, because it affects every strategy, action, behavior, and policy at your school.
New journals explore such essential topics as social conditions, exercise, neurogenesis, arts, stress, and nutrition. A school cannot remove arts, career education, and physical education and at the same time claim to be doing what’s best for the brains of its students. These are the issues we must be exploring, not whether someone can prove whether a teacher’s strategy was used before or after a neuroscience study provided peer-reviewed support for that strategy.
Today, there is still criticism, but the voices are no longer a chorus; they’re a diminishing whine. For the critic, it’s still “my way or the highway.”
That’s an old, tired theme among critics; the tactic of dismissing another’s research by narrowing the discussion to irrelevant issues, such as whether the research is cognitive science, neurobiology, or psychology. They’re all about the mind and brain.
The real issues that we should be talking about are what environmental, instructional, and social conditions can help us enrich students’ lives. To answer that, it’s obvious that everything that our brain does is relevant and that’s what should now be on the table for discussion.
Yes, we are in the infancy of brain research — there’s so much more to learn. But dismissing it is not only shortsighted, it’s also dead wrong. At this early stage, that would be like calling the Wright Brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk a failure because it only went a few hundred yards.
And let’s remember, the Wright Brothers had no credibility either; they were actually bicycle mechanics, not aviators. The future belongs not to the turf protectors, but to those with vision who can grasp interdisciplinary trends as well as the big picture. Nothing is more relevant to educators than the brains of their students, parents, or staff.
Brain-based education is here to stay.
Excerpted from Eric Jensen’s article in Kappan Magazine…. You can read the full text here.
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photo credit: Ryan Somma
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