Tag Archive for: Conversations

Should you be in to Brainwashing?

Brainwashing Students

Let’s focus on how to get off to a fresh start…by brainwashing others. Whether you work with adults or younger students directly, this month’s issue may change your approach forever. You’ll learn why you should be in the business of brainwashing. Here’s what the research tells us…

The Research

Brainwashing is the altering of beliefs, knowledge or attitudes in the mind of another. The first of your two questions is, “Should I do brainwashing?” The answer is an emphatic, “Yes!” Second, “Why?” Humans live their lives and take actions based on their narratives. Our own narrative is the aggregate of our daily routines, habits and predictive decisions, actions, values and conversations we engage in. Humans are remarkably true to their own “story”. At school, the story that students create and identify with is especially important. Read more

What About Your School’s Test Results?

Let’s address HOW to deal with the test scores that you get.

Why?

It turns out that the way school leadership, as well as the staff, thinks about, discusses, and frames the conversations about test scores actually affects future scores.

How does this happen and how should a staff debrief the testing?

The Research

The way that your staff frames their results and frames their work is critical to the ongoing success at your school.

A “framing effect” is usually said to occur when varied, but usually equivalent descriptions (of a product/experience/decision or problem) lead to very different decisions. We’ve all known this as, “It’s not what you say, but how you say it.”

New research done at the University of Michigan by Juth and Helgesson (2012) suggests that your expectations and predictions shape your future efforts via the “framing effect.”

If we started a hypothetical group of elementary children, all earning the same letter grades (ex. A, B, … F), here is how their expectations matter. In those children expecting to become a teacher, an engineer, or a nurse when they grew up, this study successfully predicted that they’d work harder in school.

In this same study, nine out of ten children expected they would attend at least a two-year college, but less than half saw themselves as having an educational degree-dependent job. This is why it is so important to tie their dreams to an actual job, not just to college.

At the secondary level, researchers presented two different options of information to two groups of students. They heard about either: Read more

Teachers: How Much Testing is Too Much?

You May Be Surprised at What the Research Says

Hardly a day goes by that I don’t hear an educator grumble about “the evils of testing.” You know what I mean: the evil empire of state and national tests that drive staff and kids into stressful zombies who learn only test-taking skills and to dislike school.

Along with, “How’s the weather?” the testing complaints have become the single common denominator in conversations about kids and learning. But what if everything you believed about testing was wrong? What if the actual science behind it was different than what you thought?

Is your school a Title 1 or Title II school? Are you struggling with raising achievement in kids who grow up in poverty?

One solution is the new ASCD book, Teaching with Poverty in Mind just released. But several, brand-new discoveries in neuroscience are now spring-boarding a revolution in how we can change the student and the school for low-income students. I’ve just had to completely reinvent my already cutting-edge workshop on poverty.

You can get it two ways: 1) Attend our 4-day event this summer for details) or, 2) bring me to your school. Yes, I am now offering this breakthrough event to individual schools (like yours). My available dates are scarce, but the kids at your school deserve to achieve. I’ll show your staff exactly how to do it. If you want to start seeing dramatic results at your school, contact my wife Diane at diane@jlcbrain.com

Here’s what the genuine “real deal” research says about our brain, testing and learning.

First of all, let’s be clear about it: there are many, many types of testing. We don’t need to list them all here, but there are as many types of testing as there are types of learning.

The list might include:

1) objective and subjective
2) abstract and concrete
3) deductive and inductive
4) classroom or “on-site” real world
5) recall or constructive knowledge
6) priming quality or in-depth knowledge and
7) etc.

In short, one must be very, very careful about generalizing the results of one type of testing to ALL types of testing.

So, given these variables, what does the research say? Read more