Brain works only with Focused Attention…

Our brain prioritizes survival above learning and emotion

Because our circuitry for survival is so strong, he pays attention to everything that feels threatening, unsafe, and unfamiliar. For students, testing, complicated topics, personal struggles, and challenging relationships could create a stress response state in their brains.

In a fight-flight-freeze response, his ability to think clearly, stay focused, and problem solve shuts down. Research repeatedly shows that quieting our minds ignites our parasympathetic nervous system, reducing heart rate and blood pressure while enhancing strategies to handle effectively the day-to-day challenges.

Several teachers in all grades have found these quieting practices very helpful. These practices, like any new skill, take much persistence and patience.

1. Breath

Sitting up nice and tall with both feet flat on the floor, take three slow, deep breaths down to the belly, breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth. Count to four on each inhale and five on each exhale, with a slight pause between the inhale and exhale. Following the three deep breaths, we then slowly turn our heads to the right on the inhale and left on the exhale. This movement is slow and deliberate. After two times each to the left and right, we then inhale while lifting our chins to the ceiling and exhale as our heads slowly move downward, touching our chins to our chests. We can repeat these movements or add our arms, the opening or closing of our hands, or any gesture that could move with the breath.

2. Touch

Students close their eyes and choose a small object out of a junk box or bag. This could be a paper clip, pencil, apple core, stick, leaf, an eraser, a pair of glasses, sock, a string or anything. For one minute or less, students keep their eyes closed and focus on the object through their other senses. Even though they might recognize the object, they should concentrate on the feel, texture, shape, angles, smell, or any aspect they notice. Following that minute of focus, the students can share the details, verbally describing what they noticed, or writing down their findings. Teachers could also throw the descriptions into a basket, and at the end of class or the day, students could select a description, guessing what the object is based on the written words.

3. Visualization

The brain responds to what we imagine as if it is an actual event. Feeling safe, peaceful, and connected with others are states of mind that can generate positive emotion and ease in critical thinking and problem solving. In our focused attention practices, we quiet the brain with safe place visualizations. The students sit quietly, closing their eyes as we verbally walk them into their favorite imaginative place. We then direct them to envision the sights, sounds, colors, and feel of their own safe place.

4. Sound

For two minutes, students close their eyes and listen for all the sounds around them. Once they have identified a sound, they capture it in their own way, such as envisioning a box around it. Students then share and compare the sounds that they heard and captured.

Maria Montessori, the first Neuroeducator…

Maria Montessori (1870 - 1952)

Maria Montessori was the first to propose an educational program focused on the child.

Maria Montessori was the first to propose an educational program focused on the child, who does not receive directives from adults and from the outside but from the inside, developing and applying them, without never underestimate the important role of parents in his growth path.

Some quotes:

A child learns from his surroundings.

If you criticize a child, he will learn to judge others.

If you congratulate a child, he will learn to appreciate what others do.

If you are arrogant with a child, he will be quarrelsome.

If you are honest with a child, he will be honest in his life.

If you mock a child, he will become shy and insecure.

If you make a child feel safe, he will learn to trust others.

If you despise a child, he will grow up with a sense of guilt.

If you encourage a child to expose his thoughts and respect what he says, he will increase his confidence.

If you are compliant with a child, he will learn to be patient.

If you support a child in what he thinks, will strengthen his self-esteem.

If you grow up a child in a pleasant atmosphere where he feels himself useful and capable, he will learn to recognize love.

Never disparage a child, nor in his presence or in his absence.

If you focus on good around a child, then evil will have no place.

Always listen to a child when he approaches.

Respect a child even when he makes a mistake: he will learn the lesson.

Always help a child when he needs it, and step aside when he does not.

Make a child understand soon how things work around him.

Show a child always the right way to do anything.

Show a child always how to give the best he can.

Emotions are Skills…

The understanding of the influence of emotions on thinking and learning has undergone a major transformation in recent years.

We all have good and bad days; moments of excitement, engagement, and inspiration and moments of disappointment, disengagement, and frustration; some topics that we find interesting and some that we do not. These differences influence how children learn and how teachers teach. In short, learning is dynamic, social and context dependent because emotions form a critical piece of how, what, when, and why people think, remember, and learn.

The understanding of the influence of emotions on thinking and learning has undergone a major transformation in recent years. Emotions interfere with learning. It is literally impossible to build memories, engage complex thoughts, or make meaningful decisions without emotion. The brain is highly metabolically expensive tissue, and evolution would not support wasting energy and oxygen thinking about things that do not matter to us. We only think about things we care. This insight has important implications for education. It opens questions about how, when, and why students learn meaningfully, how technology, culture, and social relationships shape learning and how teachers can understand and leverage emotions more productively in the classroom.

To have a hope of motivating students, of producing deep understanding, or of transferring into real-world skills, we need to find ways to leverage the emotional aspects of learning in education.

To leverage emotions, it helps to understand what emotions are. Emotions are action programs that have evolved as extensions of survival mechanisms. They have evolved to keep us alive. Human beings have basic emotions, such as fear and disgust; we have social emotions such as love. Thanks to our emotions, we can also develop curiosity to make us explore and discover, admiration to make us emulate the virtue of others, and compassion, indignation, interest.

The feeling of these emotions organizes our sociality and morality. It forms the basis for creativity and invention and for the decisions we make for now and for the future, even in academic contexts. For example, the act of dedicating one’s professional life to teaching is possible only because of our ability to feel these emotions.

Emotions are essential to managing life. An efficient life management means managing not just our physical survival but our social life and intellectual life. Just as poets and artists have suspected for millennia, we feel social relationships and intellectual achievements using the same brain systems that sense and regulate our guts and viscera, adjust our blood chemistry and hormones.

Emotions, such as interest, inspiration, indignation, and compassion, are active mental constructions. They pertain to what we think we know about the world at the current time, interpreted in light of our experiences and our imagined possible futures, using our available skills. They rely on subjective, cognitive interpretations of situations and their accompanying embodied reactions.

Meaningful learning is actually about helping students to connect their skills to abstract, intrinsically emotional, subjective and meaningful experiences. It appears to be essential for the development of truly useful, transferable, intrinsically motivated learning.

In addition, emotions develop with maturity and experience. In this sense, emotions are organized patterns of thoughts and behaviours that we actively construct across our life spans to adaptively accommodate to various kinds of circumstances, including academic demands. The emotions of a pre-schooler are not the same as those of a fifth grader, a teenager, or a young or an older adult. The emotions of a new teacher are not the same as those of a veteran teacher.

Understanding emotions is about the ways in which students and teachers are experiencing or feeling their emotional reactions.

Emotions must be considered Skills.

Thanks to Mary Helen Immordino-Yang.

Multitasking exhausts our brain…

The multiple activities crammed into our day and the constant switching between them make us very tired.

Our morning routine consists of checking emails, browsing Facebook, reading Twitter, watching Instagram, drinking coffee, Googling, checking notifications, more coffee, and so on.

The multiple activities crammed into our day and the constant switching between them make us very tired.

This switching is exhausting. It uses up oxygenated glucose in the brain, running down the same fuel that has needed to focus on a task.

That switching comes with a biological cost that ends up making us feel tired much more quickly than if we sustain attention on one thing. We tend to eat more and drink more coffee. Often what we really need in that moment is just a break.

Studies have found that people who take 15-minutes breaks every couple of hours end up being more productive. These breaks must allow for mind wandering, whether you are walking, staring out the window, listening to music or reading. Everyone gets there in a different way.

There is some differences: If we are doing something on autopilot, such as the laundry, then it makes perfect sense to read a book at the same time. Attempting to do two challenging tasks at once will lead to a drain in productivity. We cannot do two demanding, even simple tasks, in parallel.

The solution is to give up on multitasking and set aside dedicated chunks of time for each separate activity.

Let us try to check our email in the morning and again at midday and set aside 10 minutes per afternoon for social networks.

Let me know what happens…

Charming people, often mistakenly defined seducers…

It is definitely a skill to set another at their ease and to make an individual feel like the most interesting person in the room. Charm is underrated, underappreciated and perhaps just a little misunderstood. It is a mix of kindness, modesty, agreeableness and politeness.

1. Don’t be afraid to show a little vulnerability

We are conditioned to achieve and to succeed with social and professional profiles. We have become afraid to show even a chink in our social armour we have created. However, charming people know that the odd touch of vulnerability allows others to see them as human, real and approachable.

2. Say less

In our rush to promote our personal brand, the temptation to reiterate our general fabulousness to all we encounter can be overwhelming. Charming people do not do this; instead, they are assured within their own skins, preferring to let others through their significant questioning skills, have their moment to shine.

3. Look for agreement rather than contradiction

Our professional roles demand that we must challenge decisions, viewpoints and plans, defend our own position. These skills are invaluable to us but when not tempered with charm they can easily morph into a combative stance that colours all of our interactions. Charming people look for points of agreement, they do not actively look to disagree, but when appropriate, they calmly offer a different point of view.

4. Extend the same courtesy to all

It often happens that the more important the person you are dealing with, the greater the oomph you put into your interactions with them. However, there is something so appealing about a person who treats all the same, regardless of their position flipping the perceptions of others about who was worthy of attention.

5. They have a genuine interest in others

There is a difference between a person who has interest in the questions and a person who has interest in the answers. Charming people are sincere, and always want to hear and to learn and this is so appealing to others.

Losing their Attention…

When kids are restless, when someone is causing trouble, or when we know we are losing their attention, let us give them a break.

1. Let us pick some popular song for 60 seconds and let them dance it. Join in. No talking, no teasing, no mention of it before or after, just 60 seconds of uninterrupted dance action randomly inserted into the lesson when we feel they most need it.

2. One of the main issues in the teacher versus student dynamic is the generational gap, and the sense they have that we really do not understand them. The easiest way to shatter this impression is to familiarise ourselves with the things they love (TV shows, films, music, books). Talk about it in class, reference it in your lessons, draw on examples to illustrate your points, or just as a fun way to add something extra to the lesson.

3. Let us use all that pop culture knowledge to make it as fun as possible. Let us add images from things they will easily recognise and already love.

4. Let us get some funny tickets and a few boxes of chocolates. Throughout the lesson, reward good behaviour and participation with a ticket. At the end of class, anyone with a ticket gets a chocolate. One ticket equals one chocolate.

5. Let us find some stickers of all types and make sure they are cute and funny. Then make it hard to earn one. These require serious effort to earn. Let us make them rewards for unusual effort.

Lack of Attention and Focus? Be Bilingual!

The cognitive benefits of bilingualism: an enhanced ability to maintain attention and focus.

The results of a study suggest that a bilingual brain has an improved attentional control.

Bilinguals have cognitive advantages over those who only speak one language, but the nature of the advantage is unclear. They possess enhanced attentional control abilities and are better able to concentrate on a specific stimulus.

The study recruited 48 highly proficient English-Chinese bilingual, who had learned English before the age of 10 and switch between languages on a daily basis, and 51 were English monolingual speakers. The important measure was the time it took participants to respond to the stimuli presented in the tests on a computer screen. The novelty of the study was to examine slow response times separately from fast response times. 

These results suggest that bilingual speakers have better sustained attention than monolingual speakers have. The lifetime task of switching between languages appears to enhance the ability to maintain attention.

The next challenge is to determine how these behavioural changes affect the brain. 

We already known that the experience of speaking another language changes the structure of the brain and its functions. However, we do not understand very well how these changes lead to changes in behaviour.