Tag Archive for: Opportunity Notice

It’s so simple it slips by most educators

simple

Simple is Better

Lets focus on something that is so simple it slips by most educators. In fact, it is easily the most non-predicted, surprising “Top 15 factor” for student achievement. That’s partly because it is happening everyday, all day, in your work. It’s ubiquitous. It’s almost like the joke that 8-year olds tell:

“Help, help, it’s all around me!”
The friend says, “What’s the problem? What’s all around you?”
“My belt” he says, with a grin.

Actually, this factor is so powerful, it’s finally getting the research done that it deserves. Can you guess what it is?

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Ten Things You Should Know About Stress

stress

Few words are thrown around more often during the second half of the school year than “stress.” But what you’re about to find out is that… most of what you’ve heard about stress is dead wrong! For example…

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What Brain Insights Can Boost Your Student’s Classroom Success?

brain based learning insights

This month, we’ll focus on how you can get your brain (and your students’ brains) to work better. There are countless ways we could go about this process, but since it’s the beginning of a new year, we’ll focus on what contributes to us feeling happy, smarter and even losing weight. Best of all, every one of these insights are free!

The Research

In a moment, I’ll share some of the brain-based insights in human behavior. There are just TWO (out of 50+) brain chemicals that do 90% of the work in your brain. These two are the “uppers and downers.” These two must have a poor PR agent, since most educators don’t know much about them or how important they are. They are named glutamate and GABA (gaba aminobutyric acid). Read more

Over Half of all Teachers Make These 2 Mistakes.

Brain based teacherWe could focus on all the “holiday” stuff (like how to help you “navigate the holidays without adding inches to your figure”), but it’s the school year and we turn to how to affect one of the “Big Four.”

The first mistake (over 50% of all teachers make) is selling yourself short. You have far more influence than you think. The “Big Four” in teaching are: effort, behavior, cognitive capacity and attitude. When you strengthen these four, your students improve dramatically. The good news is that every one of these is teachable.

I’ll illuminate just one way you can influence a student’s attitude. The second mistake (over 50% of all teachers make) is to talk about a student’s “attitude” as if it was a fixed entity. Attitude is NOT fixed. In fact, new research shows how much teachers can influence a student’s attitude. For example… Read more

How Can You Foster MORE Student Effort?

brain-based learning

With school underway, I’d like to focus on getting students to work hard in school. Most teachers would say it sounds like a pretty good idea. I can just hear you saying, “Wow, my students just sit there. It would be great if they would put out a world class effort!” Listen; there are powerful reasons that kids don’t put out much effort. Each of the reasons leads to a powerful action step.

The first one is…

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